


Art of War

by lady__sansa_stark



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (or what I remember of it + what gifs I've seen on tumblr), Ah another example of me being gods-awful at summaries, Also chapter count is still in the works depending on how intense I make this, Angst, Cyberpunk, F/M, Future AU (including cyborgs and robots and all that fun morally grey stuff!), Maze Runner AU, War, What are tags (hint: things I'm bad at), What is love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-07-16 09:25:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16083230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady__sansa_stark/pseuds/lady__sansa_stark
Summary: [Maze Runner AU]War tears down humanity. No one knows what peace is; only war, only bloodshed, only death. Their enemy looks just like them, except electricity runs thick through veins and minds are programmed for vengeance.Humans fight back - because they can, yes, but because they have to. Because thethingsthey once made in their quest for perfection won't stop until their own creators are gone.Sansa Stark wants to fight, too. To save her family, to protect humanity. Only, she's not sure if she can.





	1. a road - either to safety or to ruin

**Author's Note:**

> [Prompted by the wonderful ER, who has kept me company throughout the year or so since they asked for this. I can’t help but wonder if they’ve just been patiently waiting for this to be written...if so, then I’m so so sorry for making you wait so long! :o
> 
> This story was inspired by this v good video (Final Call, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSW-bdUaCJU). Sort of a Maze Runner AU, but I’ll be fair and admit I’ve only ever read the first book like 10 years ago. The rest of this is based purely on (parts of) the video, and mostly my imagination.
> 
> Anywho, this is a shorty chapter, more of a prologue really. Setting up the world and all that. But! I promise there’s plenty more to come. And I can only hope that you guys will enjoy this story as much as I’ll enjoy writing it! :) }

 

         The sunset hadn’t looked the same anymore, not in a long time. Especially not with the thick haze clinging on the horizon casting the sun a deep blood-red. As though the universe herself was hurting, too. Nor have the stars remained the same. There used to be a constellation, just there, just beside the twinned fish: an open-winged bird soaring between shimmering stars. Or instead maybe it was breaking free; from the other constellations, from the confining blackness of night. It had a star for an eye, sparkling brighter than the rest of them. 

         He couldn’t remember when it blinked out of existence.

         In front of him, a sea of stars, much closer, each trapped within hollow shells of concrete and glass and metal. They looked bloody and distorted in the sunset’s hue. The shadows they cast across the ground were long and black, as dark as the growing night sky. Sometimes, if he squinted hard enough, he could pretend he was but one of a thousand, of a million, stars. 

         Stillness swept through the crumbling buildings. Stillness, and the sun’s fading light. If it wasn’t so  _ red _ , one could assume the world was  _ peaceful _ this time of night. Blackness above and below, with not even a brush of wind to make noise. Only those twinkling whites and blues and yellows creating the illusion that things were peaceful, awake and  _ alive _ . For now. Who could say those alive things would be that come the bruised purple rays of sunrise.

_ Peace _ . The world hadn’t seen that in...well, long before he could remember.

         Peace was a thing of memories, he knew. Peace was a dream, less tangible than the stars slowly blinking out with the passing war. More futile than living long enough to even glimpse such a thing. The brains that held such memories were nothing but dried splatters on concrete and dirt.

         Sparks of orange twinkled on the ground, too, between the towering dark masses of buildings, and so far off in the distance. The sounds didn’t carry, but he could imagine them all the same. Screams, human and not. The endless  _ rat-tat-tat _ of weapons. And the deep grinding of metal on metal. 

         It was a curious world they lived in now. Metal surrounded them, inside and out. There wasn’t a single creature that hadn’t been  _ improved on _ , and so few of their own will. Yet, there were those (statiscally few, and growing fewer) that believed themselves  _ better _ for being made entirely without it.  _ The taint of future destroys humanity! _ they used to scream and shout down where the shadows made the ground bottomless and empty. He didn’t know what  _ exactly _ happened to them, only that the shadows masked what remained of their  _ pure _ bodies.

         The future was ruthless, more so the things bred from it.

         A low whistle came on the breezeless air. A bird; or, would have been, if this was that alleged peaceful time. Instead, he recognized the exploding star on the horizon, bleeding into the red of sunset, seconds before the deep rumble of it echoed in his chest. That was one way to ensure peace. No way they survived  _ that _ , regardless if they were flesh or metal. 

         No way peace could come from this war. The only thing was certain was the earth would — over time — cover the broken remnants of them in a century’s time.

         Humans destroyed it — peace, the planet, their own humanity — the moment they decided killing each other with their bare hands was  _ primitive _ . ( _ And look where that’s led them!  _ he thought to himself, fingers twirling the end of the cigarette. He forgot he was holding it). Spear or bow or gun or missile, it was never enough.  _ More more more _ they screamed, until they could kill hundreds —  _ thousands _ — with barely the press of a button.  _ More more more _ they slathered, as the machines grew  _ inside _ them instead of attached like primitive guns of old.  _ More more more _ they whimpered, even as their titanium hearts ticked their last beat.

         The cigarette burned his throat. 

         No. No one was around when humans first found the fun in killing. But here he was, so many thousands years later, and humans haven’t changed their position on it. 

         Nor was he around when humans learned how to make a so-called  _ perfected _ image of themselves. The delicate construction of humanity composed of steel and wires and glowing irises. 

_ Not perfect, _ they muttered, _ not yet perfect, still blemished _ .

         Humans birthed these creations, never satisfied. The not-humans were human  _ enough _ , but inhuman enough to remind people (whether consciously or not) that they weren’t the same. And in humans’ dissatisfaction, their children of circuits fought back, with all of the weapons given to them.

         So: what made a human a human? 

         Ah, the question of the millenia! Except, there wasn’t an answer, in truth, he knew. It was instead something to be thrown back and forth without end. But he thought about it enough to pretend like there  _ could _ be a finite definition of humanity.

         Humans were alive, yes, and ever learning how to tame and control the earth they stood upon. And possibly greater, the only creature to question their own existence. Or, the first. The creatures they then created themselves were second. 

         So what made them different? Was it the blood pumping through their veins instead of electricity? 

         Was it instead their insatiable urge to learn, to explore, to create? Art and music and metallic simulacrums of themselves. Only, their children learned, too. From patiently watching their creators, expanding on the technologies implanted in them. They were just as loud chanting  _ more more more _ when their bombs shredded limb from body and splattered brains on concrete. 

         Or maybe it was the hovering fear of  _ death _ ? Of knowing how short life was, and how impossible it was to stave off the spectre of our end? Oh, but creatures of metal  _ screamed _ just as loudly when their wires were pulled from their chests, as oil leaked from wounds, as circuits buzzed quiet.

         So  _ what _ , then? 

         Feelings. Emotions.  _ Love _ . They were things that could be programmed — just look at all of the cramped bedrooms piled with sultry creations desiring to serve and please. They were things desired to be  _ felt _ , to be captured not in 1’s and 0’s, but in moments, in laughter and tears and deep aches that felt like your very chest was about to rip apart.

         It was hard to say whether things built of wires could  _ feel _ . If they could feel the same. They had to feel something, right? They had purpose in prolonging the war for as long as it had. Because of vengeance? Because of righteousness? Because they wanted some time — just a few seconds — to be held tightly? 

         Love.

         Or, an inhuman human’s idea of it.

         Did they live for things they’ve never felt  _ because _ they’ve never felt them?

         Did they love because they thought they should?

         A bright yellow light erupted in the distance. Which side was it this time, how many screamed their last breath, how dark was their blood and oil on the pavement — he couldn’t say. He brought the cigarette to his lips.

         Existential questions to be left wanting answers. A night like any other.

         Another explosion tore streaks of yellow and white through the blood-red sunset. Peace… A place where humans and  _ not-humans _ could co-exist, could live, could love...

         As if there ever was a place like that on this earth.

         (His chest, curiously, felt colder at the thought. And then his mind decided to hurt, too: the once-shining smile of girls as they all spun around a field of green smelling sweetly. The quick sigh of a gasp (his own breath) as he felt air weave between his ribs. The sharp wintry bite of waves lapping over his body as he stared up at the same stars twinkling in the blackness. They watched him lie there. They twinkled in the tears streaming down his cheeks. They listened to his pleas for it all to end. 

         They did nothing.

         He shoved the memory out).

         Ha! — a place of  _ peace  _ and  _ happiness _ and (gods-forbid)  _ love _ doesn’t exist in this world. It never had, it never could.

         So why was he here? Why was he  _ here _ : atop the Bunker, inhaling bitter cigarette smoke and admiring the twinkle of gunfire echoing the stars above.

         Why was he  _ here _ , when things shouldn’t have gone wrong in the first damn place? 

         The sun faded to barely a strip of light against the horizon. More stars were borne on the battlefield beyond, deep within the fading red of the sun. Two brilliant explosions, brighter than even the horrors he’d seen just this evening, stark and shining blue. 

         The silent world went even quieter after that. 

         The man stubbed out his cigarette against the concrete bannister, its dull orange a weak assumption of a star fallen onto the earth. Smoldering flakes caught on an errant breeze. They flew off the edge of the building, down down the forty feet to dirtied streets below. Gone, leaving him alone in darkness again.

         Oh, he absolutely  _ knew _ why he was here, didn’t he? All along, he knew. 

         He flexed his fingers, one at a time, pinky to thumb to pinky. They were stiff, stiffer in the cold. Was it winter? He couldn’t say. Everything had dissolved into a single season, and that had been years ago. So much has changed, and so much has remained the same. It was a wonder the planet was still spinning.

         In the stillness that came after the breeze, quiet echoed in his ears. Sometimes silence hurt more than cacophony. LIke he truly was alone in the universe, even as the eyes of gods sparkled down on him. 

         Carefully he snaked his fingers beneath the heavy breast of his coat, pulling the weight free. Polished silver, and unmarred. He admired its sheen in the starlight, tracing its crisp edges. He flicked the barrel open and close and open.

         Full chamber.

         It closed with a  _ clack _ , heavy in his palm, and cold. He never did much like getting his hands dirty, not  _ this _ way (he was not unused to washing his hands. Gods, look at what he did for a living! But  _ this _ , this unfeeling bit of metal, this  _ primitive _ tool of death — this was something even he couldn’t quite get used to. Savages, humans were, mowing each other down with these things. The thought ended there when he remembered what humans created instead of guns: things worse, things familiar). 

         But some things had to be done, loathe as he was to do them.

         The wind had grown silent, as if holding its breath while he stood and stared and thought.  _ Are you going to go through with it _ , it finally asked him, tickling the question across his brow.

         He licked his lips, tasting the cold on them. The sun was gone, not even a stray reminder of it along the horizon. Even the battlefield disappeared, explosions stopped in anticipation of his answer.

         His fingers skimmed down the length of the barrel, as solid and cold as he needed to be. As he should be.

         The bullet cocked with an echoing, satisfying  _ click _ . No point in dawdling. 

         The wind died just then. Was it unsatisfied with his answer? Another night he would think about it.

         Another night he would stand on the Bunker’s roof and watch the twinkling constellations, watch the birth and destruction of stars along the horizon. And with bitter smoke in his lungs, he’d realize the futility of what the world had devolved into.

         But tonight, well, there was work to be done.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This got a bit philosophical, I’ll admit... But I’ve got a lot of fun themes and drama planned for this story, and I really hope you’ll stick around for it all!! :) ]


	2. the infinite variety of circumstance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Thanks to you for reading chapter 1 and deciding (by some reason or another) to keep on reading to chapter 2! :D
> 
> I will say that I have a lot of fun developing worlds (too much fun, some might say). And that definitely doesn’t stop here. Admittedly it took some time to flesh out all of the quandaries and themes this time around, and I can only hope I can manage to relay them across to you by the end of this story!
> 
> Now enough prattling. Enjoy the next chapter (and don’t be afraid to let me know what you think!) :) ]

 

        Sansa watched the wall expectantly.

        Around her — as was wont every day at this time — were sounds and smells and voices, each clambering over the other for dominance in the cramped cafeteria. Each chair  _ screech _ ed against the concrete floor. The metal plates clattered atop the metal tables. People and shouted and laughed and groaned. Sansa knew all of that because it was the routine. But today, in truth, she didn’t hear a single sound of it. It all faded into a buzz just a fraction quieter than her own heartbeat. She knew she was holding on to something — a fork, probably — the metal digging into her palm. But the rest of the world blurred until she blinked to focus again on that wall. 

        None of it mattered, and especially not today. Because today, they were announcing which of them would be heading outside. 

        A part of her (a pretty big part) knew she wouldn’t be chosen. She hadn't yet. Not to mention she had been here for a pretty damn long time. And gods damned her if Sansa didn’t try her hardest to prove herself to the Proctors with each grueling test they gave her. She was decent enough at remembering history and devising strategy to make the others sneer at her. But the rest — the physical challenges, the concentration needed to not only aim accurately but consistently, the brutality of what they were being trained for — brought her down.

        After all, they  _ demanded _ a certain level of perfection that she hated she couldn’t reach.

        Still. There was always that  _ hope _ , wasn’t there? That maybe she somehow impressed the Proctors enough to release her outside. She looked at them as they scrutinized her with emotionless faces, writing down notes on her charts. Never once did they smile and tell her  _ Good job _ (even when the facts proved she was doing good, at the logic stuff anyways). They were impartial enough to make her wonder if maybe they  _ weren’t _ human. 

        As if the Keepers would allow robots the  _ privilege _ of anything other than mundane tasks. 

        Gods, she couldn’t wait to see her family again. Too long, she knew. A single year felt like an eternity, and Sansa was losing count the eons she spent under the diligent watch of the Proctors. She used to imagine it was her parents watching her. And now, in the blissful emptiness of sleep, Sansa could only see the Proctors’ faces in lieu of Ned’s and Cat’s. Could only hear the drone commands of the Keepers instead of the sweet songs her mother and father would sing them asleep to. Could only hear her own screams as they left her for the war down south. 

        Sansa hadn’t been alone. Arya had come with her here, and only Arya. The Keepers split the Stark children up, two at a time (even though Jon wasn’t  _ technically _ a Stark. The Keepers needed all the bodies that could train, learn, fight, kill). 

        Arya wasn’t keen on it, even if she was enthusiastic to learn weapons. Younger than Sansa, but accurate with a gun (the smaller ones, at least. Her hands couldn’t wrap around the grip of some of the automatics, or some of the controls of unarmed missiles). She could have been the star of their group, had she listened and obeyed with head slunk towards the ground.

        She didn’t. And even though Sansa hated her sister for leaving her alone, she admired Arya. Slipping through the guards’ legs as they prepared kids for deployment outside of the Bunker. Never to be seen again.

        Sansa prayed every night for her sister’s safety.

        After that, Sansa heard word only once of her family. Of Bran, off somewhere in some other Bunker doing the same grueling training. He was exceptionally bright and nimble, for someone so young. But he fell. But he was smart, quick to remember facts.

        Sansa wondered if he  _ hadn’t _ been. 

        Yes, it had been...far too long. 

        The door inset in the wall slid open. So subtly and so quietly, no one would have known people were slipping into the room had they (like Sansa) found their gaze already on it. They were as quiet as the door, entering into the shadows along the wall. A lot of the Bunker was like that, walls paneled in such a way that there would be (and definitely were) hidden passages between the ductwork. Sansa knew only because she had accidentally fallen through a door once. Endless rows of pipes traveled down towards the darkness on either side, and she listened to the unheard noises of the Bunker. Murmurs and rattle of metal. A curious footstep towards the unknown.  _ But what if I can't get out… _ Trapped to haunt the Bunker until her corpse was left unfound beneath pipes and wires. Her curiosity quickly fell away to fear as she scrambled back into the hall, listening for the sound that wasn't there of the door sliding back into place. 

        Too often she wondered what she might have found if she hadn't been scared. Someone else, an unfortunate lucky soul, left to decay in the walls of the Bunker? How rotted would their body have been? Could she have been able to tell it  _ was _ a person?

        Sansa shook the thought away.

        The Keepers stood along the edges of the room, as though expecting to blend in with the plaster. The did, mostly, their uniform as simple than the sort they made Sansa and the other kids wear. There was no  _ frivolity _ to be had here, or in the world outside. There was no frivolity in war. It was life or death, us or them. 

        The Keepers were never afraid to mention how  _ lucky _ Sansa and the rest of them were to be here, learning how to fight back, instead of succumbed to the gruesome whims of those  _ things _ . Things that looked like them. Things that had  _ learned _ how to be gruesome and savage and unfeeling — lessons taught from their creators. 

        There had been few robots in the North, by nature of the fact that the older ones weren’t prepared for the harshness of the cold on their joints or their systems. There were a handful in Winterfell. Designed specifically for the cold ( _ an experimental model series _ , the developers chimed in.  _ We’re testing the new alloy’s durability in extreme weather, as well as how their AI will adapt their movement in the snow _ ). The robots survived, better than anyone expected. Braving the harshest of the storms when it would have been reckless to send humans. The elders often knitted scarves and coats for the robots. To keep their engines from freezing, yes, But they fit in better with wool. And besides, no one was going to stop those needles working yarn because the robots did look rather adorable dressed up in toboggans and scarves. 

        As if the robots understood that. Their job was all they could do, those robots. Those models had no higher purpose than that.

        To think there were others  _ so advanced _ to rise up against humans was baffling. And interesting. And terrifying.

        But the advanced ones, the ones that looked human.... Sansa had yet to see one before she and her siblings were thrust into the Bunkers.

        The Keepers assured them they would encounter their fair share once they’d been prepared enough for the war.

        And the Keepers just stood there, against the wall. Not moving, not speaking, just watching. 

        Like they were making a final decision on who would go out this time. Like they were assessing their  _ soldiers _ bred from  _ children _ . Like they were silently placing bets on which of them would survive a day, a week, a month. 

        Like they didn’t actually care what happened to any of them.

        Like they always do. 

        “Stop staring, lovergirl.”

        Sansa shot her gaze closer to the people around her. The world came back in short blinks, but even blinking burned.

        “I’m not  _ staring _ ,” Sansa retorted, rubbing her eyes with her free hand. She unclenched the one holding her fork, letting it clatter onto her barely-touched plate. She should eat, but she wasn’t hungry. With a nod of her head, Sansa added, “They’re here for the call.”

        Harry did a double-take, having not watched the Keepers appear either. Sansa wondered if anyone else had. Probably. How inconspicuous could it be for a group of people to come out of a hidden door in the wall into a crowded room and not be seen?

        Then again, maybe that was the point.

        “You’re telling me,” Myranda began, her words slow. She had one hand propped between the table and her cheek, and a crooked smile to match a single raised eyebrow. “That you’re always — and I mean  _ always _ — staring at that wall, waiting for them to appear, not because you find one of them  _ dashingly handsome _ .”

        Sansa blinked in surprise. “I, what? Of course not.”

        Both her friends said their disbelief in the way they glanced at one another.

        “Welllllll,” Harry drawled. “We all know she hasn’t  _ loved _ someone since ol’ Jeffrey got sent out.”

        “ _ Joffrey—" _ Sansa corrected, biting her lip before she could do more damage.

        Harry’s mouth tilted up at the edge, knowing he was right. And he  _ was _ , or had been. Joffrey was as sweet as he could be, always there for Sansa when they had all arrived dazed and confused. Sansa had fallen quickly for his charms — a dashing prince, like the stories she loved. Too often she imagined them being called together, and saving the world back-to-back. The leftover Keepers would crown them Protectors of the Earth (or somesuch) and bestow them a lovely house that had been spared the destruction. And they would grow a family together as the world rebuilt itself. Happily ever after.

        Joffrey proved good — too good — with the armaments. He sent lasers splitting her hair, snagging on her uniform, grazing her cheek. Most of them left raised scars in their place, a network of lines crossing her face, her arms. He laughed with a  _ Whoops, my bad! _ before actually aiming at the targets.

        And his  _ smile _ as he did it. The disgusting curling sneer of his lips. How did she ever wish for them to kiss her! Gods strike her down, she hated herself for each day she had fallen for his charm. But his smile was the worst of it; Sansa saw it more often in her dreams. In how he would tear her flesh apart from her skin, then her muscles, then her bones, and then her very soul. His laughter rang out in the darkness.

_ Good riddance he was sent out, _ she thought, letting loose her lip from her teeth. She lapped over it, feeling the grooves from her bite.  _ I hope he didn’t last a day _ .

        “I’m sure he’s doing  _ just fine _ ,” Myranda said while (not at all furtively) glancing over her shoulder, her thick curls whipping about. Her words — however hopeful — didn’t sound like it at all. None of them quite knew what to expect in the outside world. And none of them quite knew when they were  _ ready _ — as quoted by the Proctors that monitored their progress.

        Joffrey, apparently, had been ready. So had a slew of other kids. 

_ Kids… _

        Sansa wasn’t blind to that fact. Save for Myranda, who was only a few years older than she was (though she arrive later than Sansa, likely because the Vale was so far out of the way no one wanted to brave there to collect the children until they had to), no one here could be remotely classified as anything other than a  _ kid _ . 

        Could any child truly be ready when it came to stopping those things? The Keepers thought so (or had to. Why else would they be rounding kids up, teaching them, giving them weapons, and shipping them off to the battlefield? Surely there were adults to fight for them, or even robots that hadn’t turned allegiance. But  _ children? _ )

        “I’m sure he’s  _ not _ ,” Harry chimed in, scratching his chin. 

        Myranda smiled, turning to look where the Keepers stood. “Oh, I’m  _ definitely _ sure he’s not. At least, not anymore.”

        Harry smiled too, then recoiled in (mock) apology. “Oh, we shouldn’t be joking about Sansa’s first love! How rude of us!”

        Sansa ignored him, choosing instead to look at Myranda. Her friend was still peeking behind her. “What is it, Randa?”

        There was a crease between her friend’s brows when she finally turned back. Her fingers were slow in rearranging her hair. They curled up tighter when wet, and the training that morning had been vigorous. Sansa knew she was going to wake up with sore legs tomorrow — they were starting to cramp already. “I think…” Myranda licked her lips, trailing off. She shook her head, a silent  _ It’s nothing _ . 

        “What?”

        Myranda shook her head, glancing first at Harry, then Sansa. “Eh, I dunno. It’s probably nothing.”

        “ _ What _ ?” Sansa demanded. There was something to be said about Myranda’s instincts, even if she ignored them half the time. Like yesterday, during trap disarming. Myranda yelled at them not to cross the street yet,  _ certain _ that they were more mines than those they disarmed. Sansa repeatedly said that they accounted for them all already, and Harry did nothing more than argue  _ There were twelve, and we did twelve! _

        Sansa, more than anything, had wanted to be right. Even if (in retrospect) she could have died.

        Myranda ignored their yelling and threw the deactivated bomb across the road. It rolled over the gravel, straight through the doorway of the building that marked the completion-

        -and blew up.

        Those instincts kept Myranda’s (and yesterday, both Harry’s and Sansa’s) head firmly on her shoulders.

        Shoulders that shrugged. “I told you, Sans, it’s probably nothing. But if you’re so  _ insistent _ , then, gods—" she motioned with her chin at the Keepers behind her. "—I think one of them’s got their eyes on you.”

        Instinct told Sansa not to snap her head at the wall, but she did it anyway. There were Keepers, the same group that always came out whenever there was a call. The oldest of them, standing in the center, and the rest on either side. Each of them focused on a different part of the room, making whatever sort of mental notes needed. Strategists in their own right, and the reason the war had lasted as long as it had. Because the alternative was humans subjugated to the robots’ whims.

        None of the Keepers were looking at  _ her _ , specifically. Sansa opened her mouth to correct Myranda as such-

        But there was a Proctor amongst the Keepers today. Standing behind the others, obviously not a Keeper because of the way he stood and the simplistic uniform he wore. Sansa tried to see which of them it was.

        “Attention.”

        Gaggles and giggles immediately turned into the silence as every face turned towards the Keepers (and Proctor) standing at the back wall. As if on cue, the partial-darkness that kept them hidden disappeared, and it was impossible to look elsewhere. 

        Sansa sat up straighter.

_ You’re going to be called _ , came one voice. And another:  _ Why do you even try anymore? _

        She was never picked, not in her many (too many) years here. But she honest to gods tried her best each day knowing that they  _ had _ to pick her. Today, or tomorrow, or...one day. Some day.

        Sansa felt her own heartbeat in her ears as she watched them, waiting for the announcement. It was always made by the eldest of them, the most experienced of them. The head Keeper was a gruff man of few words, with just enough greying hair to counteract the gold. He must have been handsome in a prior life. Even before the war took half of his face. Silver sparkling in the light, sharp lines of metal matching the earned wrinkles in his skin. A light traveled down into the collar of his coat, matching the vein, and a spark of gold shimmied down with each of his own heartbeats. 

        Or, maybe that’s why he never smiled. To be so  _ obviously _ repaired like that.

        It wasn’t a  _ secret _ especially amongst the Keepers that they loathed the sorts of things that existed outside of the Bunker. The sorts of things people like them made to slaughter other people, other things. 

        The thick tension grew the millisecond the head Keeper opened his mouth. Sansa felt her heart freeze for those few words. She ached to hear hers. She ached to not hear hers. Even now she was torn.

        “Greysen. Kettleblack. Hardyng—"  _ wait,  _ "—report to the medical ward for your release preparation.” He nodded once to announce he was done.

        That was all the fanfare they ever got. But it was more than enough, especially this time-

        “ _ Harry _ .”

        He was scrunched up into himself, as though Myranda’s accusatory finger had the power to crumple man with nary a point. His own hands flew up in front of him, claiming his innocence, but not before Myranda spoke up first.

        “What. Did. You.  _ Do _ .” Each word was punctuated with a growing movement over the table, until she was nearly standing.

        “What-? I-!” Except Harry was at much a loss of words as either Sansa or Myranda were. And the other kids sitting near enough to eavesdrop (without really trying to look like they weren’t) stared. 

        Myranda’s magical finger was now paired with her other hand rubbing against her temples. Slowly she sat herself back down, her chair screeching against the floor. “How did… What in the Seven did you  _ do _ to get released so soon? There’s  _ no way _ you’re more ready than either of us, let alone Greysen or Kettleblack. Like,” Myranda let loose her grip on her forehead, and Sansa spied angry pink crescents. “Greysen, I could understand, she should’ve gone out  _ weeks _ ago. And I get Kettleblack, too. But…you...”

        Harry shrugged so hard his head looked an inch away from collapsing into his chest. “Look. I’m as surprised as you. I  _ know _ I’m not gods-damned ready. And I…” He buried his face in his hands, whacking it all atop the tabletop in a solid  _ thump _ . His words were muffled by skin and metal, but Sansa heard the crack in it all the same: “Oh, fuck. I’m not fucking ready.”

        Sansa looked back to where the Keepers had stood, finding only the smooth wall. Her gaze dragged back to Harry, to join in on Myranda’s interrogating, when she stopped.

        The rest of the cafeteria was staring at them. At Harry.

        And she saw it writ plainly on most everyone’s face: jealousy. 

        Sansa knew it was on hers, too. She  _ felt _ it, in the clench of her jaw, in the press of her fingertips into her legs (to keep from hounding Harry like Myranda had). Hells, Sansa  _ heard _ it echoing in her own head:  _ why him? What makes him think he’s even good enough to be sent out _ . She shook her head, hating that the thoughts popped up in the first place; hating more that they flew down her spine to wrap around her heart.  _ It was a mistake _ , they taunted.  _ It should have been you _ .

_ Why should he go and not you? _

        The thought manifested in the way every other kid was staring at Harry. 

        Sansa tore her gaze from the rest of them, ignoring (or doing her best to) the heavy weight of each of their stares. Did her best to school her face into normalcy, even as she felt the sting in her eyes.

        “Well.” 

        Sansa turned, finding her friends staring at her. She hadn’t realized the  _ Well _ had been hers. And hoped to all the gods that none of those awful thoughts came springing from her mouth. From the way they were staring, no. “I… Congrats, Harry. I knew you could do it eventually.”

        He looked like he didn’t know if he should thank Sansa or not. And Sansa didn’t wait for a reply, looking out across the room again.

        Greysen and Kettleblack were nowhere to be seen. They must have sprinted (not figuratively) to the med ward the moment their names were called.  _ They _ were ready, more than ready, and more than willing to follow the orders of the Keepers once out in the world.

        Harry? 

        Sansa tried to think that maybe,  _ maybe _ , he had proven himself in his one-on-one lessons more than he did in the group training. Hiding some hidden array of secret talents that only he and the Proctors were privy to. That was his secret — secrecy.

        Though what good was it to hide something? It wasn’t like there were robot spies among the kids, waiting to be sent out to cross the lines and tell on them.

        Whatever it was that made Harry stand out wasn’t something Sansa could think of. At least, not in the way the Keepers would want in war. Were they won over by the fact that Harry could shoot water from a tea kettle into a cup six and a half feet away? Or the fact that he had a comeback for every little thing? Or the fact that he had a proclivity for being  _ accidentally _ discovered walking back from the wrong bedroom?

        Sansa thought back to every skill of her friend, and came up short.

        None of that mattered in life or death.

        “Well,” Harry said finally, breaking the silence (not just at their table, but in the room. Even though some of the others had gone and left already, the rest were (likely) waiting in eavesdropping). “Wouldn’t want to keep the old man waiting.”

        Neither Sansa nor Myranda returned the jape of the elder Keeper. 

        They headed towards the med ward in silence. 

        Preparations were mostly under wraps save for the people being sent out for the mission. Sansa knew they had to outfit the kids to be properly  _ ready _ . With weapons and gadgets alike the ones they practiced with. And things more advanced, more deadly. 

        And things like what the elder Keeper had.  _ Enhancements _ to keep them alive.

        Picturing Harry with half a silver face was equally amusing and horrifying. 

        Picturing Harry with half a face — the rest of it spilt on concrete — was worse.

        The medical wing was always busy. Kids with scrapes and bruises and broken bones filled the infirmary. Never for long — the medicines worked fast enough to stitch up wounds and rebuild tissues so they could get back to training as quick as possible. The nurses always apologize for their medicines not being potent enough. Sansa couldn’t imagine something strong enough to repair the entire insides of someone quicker than a day. To think it used to take days, or weeks.

        Half of the wing was dedicated to research, doors locked three times with key and password and fingerprint. Sansa peered through it a few times in hopes of seeing something more exciting than another hallway. Today was no different.

        And the end of the wing was for preparation. Sansa was as clueless to it, too. But at least when the doors slid open she heard the whir of saws and the shuffling of metal. Sansa never did like those sounds.

        Harry turned on his heel, a wide smile spreading his lips. Happy, excited even. He went so far as to spread that smile into his eyes — a twinkling, warm brown. Went further, grabbing Sansa in a tight bear hug without a word.

        Still, Sansa knew the truth, even if the frantic beating of his heart echoing into her own chest hadn’t given it away. Harry was fucking  _ terrified _ . Harry was trying his best to not look like he was a second away from shitting himself. Maybe he would, the minute the doors closed on him and the Bunker. 

        Myranda came in for a hug on Harry’s other side, and she and Sansa instinctively squeezed him tight. Too tight. None of them wanted to let go. 

        “You guys are  _ awful _ ,” he said, when the finally did (only because otherwise they would smother him to death). Harry was fake-rubbing his sides as though all his guts were about to pop from his skin.

        Myranda opened her mouth to retort, but closed it.

        Researchers walked past them, mumbling their grievances of  _ Don’t stand in the middle of the halls _ as they went on. Straight for the prep room. The doors slid open upon their unlocking, and Sansa saw Greysen and Kettleblack in there, along with a dozen other guards and a handful of same Keepers who were in the cafeteria. The head Keeper wasn’t among them, but he never was. It was the formality of being called by him that had him announcing each time who would be sent out, but they all knew the head Keeper preferred the solitude of strategizing. They only survived this long in the war because of his brain.

        Even if speculation whispered whether it was fully human or not.

        “You should be in there by now.”

        All three of them turned to the annoyed look of a Proctor. She was as short as Myranda, with hands on her hips. Annoyance was the closest thing to emotion Sansa saw of them. Certainly robots didn’t know how to be annoyed.

        Harry smiled sheepishly at her. “Ah, yes. Well I want my friends to come with me. Hold my hand when you’re putting all the nanochips and laser-eyes and whatnot in me. I’m secretly not a fan of needles.”

_ We’re not allowed to come with you, _ Sansa knew. The hug wasn’t one of encouragement, but of goodbye.

        And the Proctor did, too. Shifting the smallest of glances her way before tilting her head at Harry in a  _ Don't you know the rules already.  _ Not a question. 

        Because Harry — about to prepare himself for the outside world — should know.  _ Should  _ be prepared. 

        The Proctor shook her head, not even bothering to give Sansa or Myranda a proper glance. “I’m afraid your...friends, they aren’t allowed inside. And you are…?”

        From where she stood, Sansa could see the shifting vein in Harry’s neck. From anger, yes, but she couldn’t help but know it was that constant press of fear, too. That he had expected not to have to say goodbye to them so quickly. Nor them to him.

        “Hardyng. The old— Uh, I was called today.” A smile.

        The Proctor pulled up a datafile from her wrist, scrolling through it. “Ah. Yes. Hardying, Harrold. You should be in there by now. The preparation for you will take some time.”

        “‘Cause I’m so great, huh?”

        The Proctor didn’t smile. She closed the file, walked around them, and unlocked the door. Stood there, waiting for Harry.

        In less than a heartbeat, Harry’s smile flickered, so quick it might have been a trick of the lighting. “Well, then. Shit, this is goodb—" A breathy laugh. He jogged over to the door, turning around with a thumbs-up. “See ya guys on the other side! But don’t keep me waiting!” 

        The Proctor beside him looked halfway between amused and confused.

        The doors slid closed on them.

        Silence drowned the hall. Even the patients in the infirmary had quieted their moaning. The buzzing of lights above, too. Sansa strained for the sounds on the other side of that door, but she couldn’t even make out her heart.

        “He’s a fucking  _ idiot _ ,” Myranda seethed, tears in her eyes, hands balled. 

_ As if he had any choice in it _ , Sansa was about to say, holding her tongue. Both of them had staved off the truth of their thoughts: that in no way could Harry be  _ actually _ ready to face the sorts of horrors the Keepers 

        So instead of speaking the truth, or speculating on it, Sansa said, “He’ll be okay.”

        Myranda was still for a few seconds. Then she nodded, slowly brushing away her bangs, and doing a poor job of keeping her hair out of her eyes. This time the other side, then the first. Wiping away tears that glittered silver in the fluorescents. Crying. If Sansa didn’t know better, she wouldn’t have taken her friend to be so emotional. 

        “Besides,” Myranda added, her voice surprisingly level. Sansa looked at the door, pretending like her friend’s eyes weren’t rimmed red. “Now we just have to make sure we get sent out on the next group to save his ass.” 

        She laughed, too. Laughter was better than fear, she knew. 

        Except on the battlefield.

        Where that gods-awful image of Harry’s face shredded by claws and melted by lasers, so ruined Sansa wouldn’t be able to tell one dead body from another. She shook her head, but the image persisted.

        Sansa felt tears in her eyes, too, but she fought them from falling. Emotion — any emotion, laughter or fear or rage or sorrow — would be the death of her on the battlefield.

        “Miss Stark.”

        Sansa froze, and Myranda ran into her, nearly toppling the both of them over. “Hey!” She said, shoving herself off of Sansa, before following her friend’s gaze to the man beside them. “Oh.”

        Sansa turned to her friend, whose eyes were still teary but whose mouth was curling into a smile. She opened her mouth to ask what was up, but Myranda beat her to it. “I’ll leave you two alone then.”

        She sauntered away, not before giving Sansa a conspicuous tear-stained wink.

        Sansa stared at man who called her. The doors to the prep room were sliding closed behind him, and he had a notepad under one arm. Clad in typical greys and blacks and whites, a palette that matched the curls of his hair. He was just another of the Proctors. They all monitored them, taking turns. Eventually their faces blurred into a monstrous conglomerate of a person.

        But he was also the one that had been staring at her during lunch. 

        “Yes?” Her mouth finally worked. Her friend was only teasing earlier, Sansa knew. And she just had to say goodbye ( _ for the last time _ ) to her other friend. That’s why her stomach was in knots.

        The Proctor pulled up his notepad as he approached her, flipping through the pages. “A good thing I’ve run into you. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind being a part of a, ah, study.” He stopped before her, close enough that she could make out the color of his eyes. Grey-green, and unsmiling.

        Sansa took a step back. “A...study?”

        He was reading through something fascinating in his notes, lips pursed. He hadn’t heard her, so she repeated herself. This time, he seemed to remember he was talking to someone. “Yes. A study, one that you seem to be the perfect candidate for, Miss Stark.”

        He smiled. Just like the other Proctors — fake, analytical. They were humans, but by gods could Sansa mistake them for robots.

        She licked her lips. “What...what sort of study would this be?”

        One of his hands tapped along the backside of the notepad. It moved to the rhythm of her heart. “Routine things, nothing at all unlike what we put you through already. I suppose you could call it...hm...personal tutoring?” He smiled again, and Sansa knew she didn’t like it. “That is, of course, if you say yes. You don’t have to accept, if you don’t want to.”

        Sansa stared at him. At the smile that was so obviously forced yet whose act looked entirely natural. Like it was a movement he’d done a hundred, a thousand times. 

        Worse was his  _ proclamation _ . This was...unconventional, to put it mildly. In all the years Sansa had been here (and there were a lot), not once had she heard or seen of a Proctor taking such a one-on-one interest in them. Least of all with someone who was  _ average _ (there wasn’t any kidding in Sansa’s abilities. She unfortunately knew how unremarkable she was compared to the rest of the kids here, maybe except for a handful. She excelled in the survival skills better than some, and the strategy exercises came to her naturally. But the  _ messier _ things they wanted them to learn, to be perfect in… Tried as she might, Sansa hadn’t the stomach for it. There was a reason she had yet to be called, after all, as loathe as she was to admit it).

        But Harry was gone. And Sansa wouldn’t be surprised if Myranda left her, too. And a week would pass, a month, a year… How long would it be until she was finally called to the outside world? Until she could find her brothers and sister, her parents? Until she could step foot again in Winterfell (or, what remained of it. The war tended South, and what little intel the Keepers revealed suggested as such. Sansa would cry if she returned home only to find it rubble beneath snow!) 

        Sansa clenched her fist. The Proctor’s smile was still there, unmoving. If it weren’t for blinks or the slow rise of his chest, Sansa might have thought him a robot. One that looked as eerily human as one with blood instead of electricity.

        So, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing then. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to fix all of her faults. To stomach the worse of the things she had to do to get out of here. To not cringe under the weight of the weapons, or the sort of havoc the wrecked (or the feel of their lasers on her skin, searing scars in neat lines). To not  _ feel _ .

        And then she (and Myranda) could go meet up with Harry again in the outside world. 

        And then she could go meet her family again. They could be a family again. 

        Sansa smiled, feeling how fake it was because she had just seen an even faker one not five feet from her. “That sounds great.”

        To say his smile unnerved Sansa was an understatement. Her eyes were drawn to it, drawn up to the curious shade of his eyes. Like morning fog resting over the towering trees in the Wolfswood. Or the clinging of dew on moss. Or...something else, something Sansa couldn’t quite describe. It was all of those  and none of those, and more. 

        It was a gaze that was looking straight into her.

        Myranda’s words echoed in her head: _ stop staring lovergirl _ .

        She hadn’t, and she wasn’t. 

_ But was he? _

        His voice ripped her from her thoughts, and she was glad of it. “Excellent. We will begin your training tomorrow, then.” He smiled again, and it was the closest to a true smile that she had seen on him. “I look forward to working with you, Miss Stark.”


	3. accommodating the enemy's purpose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Sorry this is a little later than usual! Work has been mmmm awful this month. As such I’m splitting this up into 2 parts, the next which should be up Sunday (give or take). ALSO please note that the next few chapters might be up not so regular because I’ll be going on vacation end October/early November. I’ll try and write in between, but if I don’t, please don’t forget about this story :P
> 
> As always, a million thanks for reading! I’m really loving this world, and I hope you are too! Seriously, you are awesome!! :D ]

 

         He didn’t stare at her for the first four minutes and seven seconds. Or, so she assumed the time; it wasn’t like she was glancing at the clock every few seconds, or listening to each of her heartbeats, or watching the Proctor’s fingers drum from pinky to forefinger on the back of the thick file in his hands.

_ Her _ file. 

         Sansa had never seen in it, nor has she seen it this close before. Proctors preferred their technology: files and documents called up with a flick of their wrist, thoughts added as addendums to the day’s monitoring, and unblinking eyes that probed beneath the stale uniforms at how their  _ test subjects _ were faring physically and mentally. Despite all their efforts to squash robots, it was strange how ingrained technology was for the Proctors (and the Keepers, limbs and faces rebuilt with metal and wires). So it was strange seeing something physical. Stranger still was this  _ predicament _ she found herself in, and not for the past four minutes and twenty-one seconds. 

         The people who watched and monitored them were rather protective of the children they were training — and not in the way a parent might be. As though, perhaps, Sansa and the rest of them were only  _ things _ to be tested and evaluated and tossed outside into the havoc of war once they were through. As though, perhaps, Sansa was nothing more than a lab rat.

         Maybe they were. Were lab rats willingly given over to their experimenters, or was it something that was expected of them since birth — a life dedicated to be prodded and probed. A life dedicated to be thrown away once its use was filled.

         But this was war they were in the midst of, and this wasn’t strange to enlist people to train to fight.

         But this was a war fought not with robots, but against them. And a war where people as young as Sansa (no, gods, as young as Arya) were collected. Jon and Robb had been  _ collected _ a few years earlier, and neither of her parents were keen to say goodbye to them. They were, at least, the best of the Stark children fit for a life of battle. 

         They were expected to be the only Stark children to be collected.

         Not  _ taken _ , Sansa remembered.  _ Go _ , her mother said into her hair as Sansa was crushed within her mother’s embrace. Her father was doing the same to Arya. Catelyn Stark wasn’t willing to say goodbye to her children, not so soon and not like this. Never in their wildest dreams had any of them imagined the war would touch Winterfell. No, not touch it. Pry the North apart, picking what it wanted with only a vague promise to return the children. The Starks weren’t free from the call to war, and neither were the rest of the families. 

         Whispers to ignore the call for reinforcement stirred unbidden amongst those in the North.  _ Why should we fight when we barely even use those things! _ was a common sentiment shared with or without cups in hand.  _ Not our fucking fault they got in this fucking mess in the first place. _

         Less than a week after the first call (for the North’s children) and none remained of the robots save splinters of metal beneath fresh snow.

         “Be safe,” Catelyn said as Sansa felt her mother’s arms loosen around her. She held her by the shoulders, a grip that was half-way between holding on and letting go. Tears betrayed her mother’s eyes. They were...blue, yes. Blue like her own eyes. And her hair was the same: the deep shade of autumn. “Be strong, my sweet Sansa.” She smiled at her daughter, one that was filled with the prospect that it could be the last. After all, they heard nothing of Robb or Jon since their farewell two years ago.

         Sansa looked over at her father, and he looked towards her. He had brown hair, like Arya, and a kind smile, but… 

         Sansa bit the inside of her cheek, here in the present, where the hands of the clock continued to move in silence. She would bite down on that last memory of her parents if it would help keep it from falling into the haze of forget. Each passing day felt like she was losing a detail of her family, her home, her life before all of  _ this _ . Sansa couldn’t remember when she forget what her father’s face looked like. And gods be damned if she forgot her mother’s face. A blessing, then, that Sansa looked so much like Cat.

         She bit her cheek harder, enough that she tasted metal. It didn’t alleviate the gnawing ache in her chest. 

         Five years. She reached adulthood staring up at the unrelenting concrete of the bunkroom, and she prayed to all of her mother’s and father’s gods that she wouldn’t sing another  _ happy birthday _ to the same concrete. Five years, and still Sansa was here.

         She gnawed on her cheek again, lapping over the closed wound with a tongue searching for blood. A dream, yes. This surely  _ had _ to be a dream. A bloody war between people and the machines they created. A war so dire they resorted to using  _ children _ to fight inhuman things built with the efficiency and ruthlessness so many humans yearned for. It was straight out of the novels she sometimes read back home (though, they were too depressing sometimes). 

         She nipped at the wound, wincing. Gods help them. How  _ could _ it be real, any of this? 

         “...Miss Stark?”

         Sansa blinked the thoughts away. The Proctor was looking at her, hands clasped atop a knee that was perched over the other leg. He looked relaxed. Sansa glanced at the clock: six minutes and seventeen seconds.

         The thoughts returned, however hard Sansa tried to push them out ( _ They can read ‘em _ , Harry said with such confidence once. None of them knew for sure, but none of them wanted to chance the only private part of their existence to the prying fingers of the Proctors. Sansa scolded herself for letting her mind wander in their presence). 

         Still, it did wander. He wasn’t one she immediately recognized. But they were human, too. They had lives — and friends, and family — before this war.  _ And after…? _ Did he have children that he had to give up for it, too? It was obvious that the other children she trained with (and against) came from all over Westeros. She even spied an Essosi girl, the age and size of Arya. Equally quick with her wits as she was with her feet. Sansa hadn’t known where she had gone, but she didn’t stay long in the Bunker.

         Sansa slowly adjusted her hair behind her ears, hoping that when she spoke her voice wouldn’t betray the longing of home in her soul. “Yes?”

         He continued to stare at her as she did him. It was unnerving, but not in the usual unnerving way that the Proctors and Keepers looked at them. If he was reading her thoughts, he was good at hiding it. 

         He sat in an equally uncomfortable chair across from her in the small room. Concrete surrounded them, and there might once have been an attempt to  _ cheer the place up _ with white paint. It all looked grey now. There wasn’t any sunlight, the only window on the door that provided both assurance that the Proctors couldn’t abuse the kids, and faint hope that if they did someone could see. Sharp lights above reflected off his glasses, blinding her to one eye. The other, however, stared resolutely on her face. He smelled faintly of cigarette smoke; Sansa thought of her grandfather.

         “Do you understand why you’ve been chosen, Miss Stark?” His voice was softer than she remembered, even if it made her jump. Had he noticed she was watching him? Likely. There was a little crook of his mouth, one that Sansa tried to remember if it had been there before or not.

         She licked her lips. “I…” He spoke of it as a  _ study _ , though that might only have been the farce to say in public. A farce still in this room. She never did find where the camera was, but the feeling of more than two eyes looking at her was constant. “If you want to remind me…”

         “Of course.” The line of his mouth dipped into something almost like a smile. Almost. The Proctor took off his glasses, placing them atop her file. His fingers carded through hair that was more peppered with grey than the lack of lines on his face would suggest. He clasped his hands in front of him. “This is, as I believe I mentioned to you before, a bit of personal tutoring. There’s no doubt that your skills are exceptional—" Sansa felt her chest swell with pride. "—and it only begs the question  _ why _ you have yet to be called for deployment.”

         Her chest deflated just as quickly. 

         “Curious, isn’t it?” he added, with another not-quite-smile.

         Was he trying to be friends with her? Instinct told Sansa to be on alert; they just wanted to use her, after all. At least outside, on the uncertainty of the battlefield, she would be free of their constant scrutiny. “I...yes…”

         He nodded. “We can assess you, physically and mentally, as I’m sure you’ve had plenty of experience.” His fingers drifted over the top of her file. The size of it alone would attest to how long she’s been here, but hearing it the way this Proctor said it made her feel inadequate.  _ Look at you, _ he was not-saying _ , trying to be perfect but you’re still here! _ He didn’t say any of that, of course. “I would like to begin by asking  _ you _ why you think that is?”

         “Why...I’m still here?” Sansa was trying to make sense of his motives. To do this, yes, but to pick  _ her _ . He made it clear already she wasn’t  _ good enough _ .

         The Proctor nodded. “If you will.”

         “I suppose I’m…”  _ Be brief _ , her mind warned.  _ Don’t let him know too much _ . “The physical tests, I would say. I’m… I know I need to work on several of those areas.” A pity this wasn’t the Wes-Ess War. Sansa would have been a great spy, sitting with her needlework and smiling sweetly whenever the enemy remembered she was there. She wouldn’t need to know how to fire a gun or run a five-minute mile. A pity robots were unfeeling, and not so foolish to fall for the  _ little old lady knitting _ trick. 

         She was suddenly overcome with a longing for her needlework. For one of her novels, the edges worn with countless re-reads. For Lady. For home.

_ Don’t think about them _ , came a sharp voice in her mind.  _ Especially not when he’s asking about your weaknesses _ .

         Surprisingly, he wasn’t writing anything she was saying down.  _ He’ll write it down later _ , she knew. Unless the physical file was a farce; for all Sansa knew, his eyes were recording each of her nervous ticks, his ears listening for the small ticks in her voice. They were human, the Proctors, but they weren’t made only of flesh and blood.

         The silence stretched, from seconds to minutes. Sansa fought against the urge to look at the clock, worried that the man before her was less human than he appeared. She also fought to keep her hands still, despite how desperately they ached to fiddle with the hem of her shirt, or find some bit of stray paper to tear apart into a million stars. There was a loose thread on her shirt’s cuff. It took all her effort not to pull it free. Arya — being younger and considerably more rebellious — told Sansa one night in their bunks not to show fear.  _ They’re like wild wolves, you know _ , her sister whispered.  _ Waiting. But we gotta pounce first _ . Arya had. Sansa had not. 

         “So you think you’re weak.” It didn’t quite come out as a question.

         Sansa gripped her fingers tighter. “I...don’t know. Yes? I’m not, um, the best shot. And I won’t be first pick for relays.” She bit her mouth closed. She wanted to say  _ Just look in my file, you’ll see how horrible I am _ . 

         “Armies require more than brute force,” he countered. Sansa understood that — the Proctors were part of the army (in a way, training the new recruits, even if the new recruits were greener than the Wolfswood in the heart of spring), and most lacked the build to carry weapons and run the hurdles they sent the children through. Sansa was far from the best physically, but at least she wasn’t the worst. Then again, she wasn’t sure if it was good her running companions were thirteen. 

         When Sansa looked up to meet his gaze, the Proctor tapped one long finger against his temple. “Strategy is just as important as strength. You’ve done more than well in mental exercises. Even your weakest subject is miles better than the average trainee. Granted, identifying and defusing bombs is stressful regardless. At least if you’re wrong, you won’t live long enough to stew over your failure.”

         Sansa wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.

         “Still,” he continued, “your marks are high in most of the tactical courses, a skill that gets better with experience. Your leadership is mid-level, but that’s also something that will grow with time. Ethics are, well, those things don’t have ethics...” He paused, catching himself rambling. “But your overall capacity for reading a situation and devising a solution is far above many of the others in your level. That’s why — if you were still wondering — why I’ve decided to take a special interest in you, Miss Stark. Surely you’ve been waiting long enough to join the fight proper.”

_ Five years...and the war still isn’t over _ , she struggled not to say. It wouldn’t help her to be rude, not to the person that she felt could get her out of here. 

         Oh, if only Sansa had the courage to sneak out with her sister. Arya asked her, almost  _ begged _ her. What was a wolf on her own, out in the unknown of warfare?

_ Alive _ .

         Sansa still prayed to the Seven that Arya — and Robb, and Jon, and Rickon and Bran, and her mother and father — was alive.

         If the Proctor noticed her need to fidget, he didn’t say anything. “As I’m sure you are well aware, this war has gone on for longer than, well, anyone could have anticipated. At this point, we’re merely biding our time until the robot’s batteries run out…” Another joke that Sansa didn’t laugh at.

         “Why—" Sansa bit down on her lips. The man sitting across from her was proving dangerous in the casual way he talked.  _ As if we were friends _ , came that familiar warning. But they weren’t. They were — at best — a teacher and a student. Only, this was far from the best situation Sansa could dream of herself.

         “ _ Why _ … Yes, why indeed.” The Proctor mused. “Hubris, on our part, of course. No other creature on earth has managed that sort of masturbatory pride as human robots. But the robots? What is their aim, do you think…?”

         Sansa kept herself from replying. For a start, she didn’t know. She wasn’t a robot, nor had enough interactions with the ones that could think (and feel, some say). A truthful, “I, don’t really know,” came out instead of wild conjectures. (Sansa of course came up with wild ideas with her friends, but most if not all sounded silly with the prospect of telling one of the people that monitored them).

         He caught on to her apparent disinterest, too, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands atop of each other. Again, he stared at Sansa, this time without the cover of his glasses. His eyes were shadowed from the light, but they were grey. Not quite like Arya’s. A different shade of grey, as uncertain as his motives. That niggling voice reminded Sansa that he wanted  _ something _ other than the parental joy of seeing her succeed. 

         Another part wondered if this — these introductions, even that question — had been a test. One that she was unsure if she was passing.

         “Do you have any questions, Miss Stark?” he asked with another attempt of a smile.

         Of course she did. The first came out in halves. 

         “Will I be—" Sansa swallowed, saliva and fear and doubt, "—ready, once this training is over?”

         She knew that must be why she was picked for this, anyways, but it would be nice to hear it from one of them. It was one thing to be congratulated on her wit, but another to be told a definite  _ Yes _ that she could go out and find her family. Harry counted as family; there was a bond between them and Myranda and everyone else scrutinized by the Proctors and Keepers that no one else could break. 

         The Proctor nodded. “I should imagine you’d be ready. If not, well…” 

         He didn’t finish the thought.

         “Anything else before we begin?”

         A million other questions fired in her brain, but Sansa knew he wasn’t going to answer them. This cordiality between them was a ruse (or so her mind warned her). Still, she couldn’t help but listen to the questions that fired off in her head:

_ Aren’t there other kids — better kids — you’d rather be spending your time training? _

_ Why do  _ you _ think the robots are fighting against us? _

_ Will the war end only when one side has entirely wiped off the other? _

_ Can there be a peace between us after so much fighting? _

_ What made Harry ‘ready’? _

         Sansa’s jaw hurt. She clenched it tight enough to keep errant questions from spilling out between them. They were far from  _ friends _ , and they were farther still from what Myranda teased about. 

         Besides, he was testing her. No doubt this conversation would be recorded — if it wasn’t already, Sansa’s eyes darting to the corners of the room for hidden bugs. It wouldn’t help her cause to have  _ Questions authority at every chance _ stamped in her file. 

         It wouldn’t help her if she wanted to — needed to — get out.

         A quick (and slightly embarrassing) realization hit her. “You, ah, you never said your name.” 

         “Oh, where are my manners?” His mouth curled into a small smile of his own mock embarrassment, but the mirth didn’t spread anywhere else. Leaning forward across the narrow gap with an outstretched palm, he added, “I’m Petyr, Petyr Baelish. In case it wasn’t apparent, I’ll be proctoring these tutoring sessions for you.”

         Sansa looked at his hand for a heartbeat before taking it. It was colder than she expected ( _ Like his smile _ , she thought, giving him one of her own with at least enough sincerity that he couldn’t tell she was only incredibly afraid). “Nice to meet you.” She managed, at least, to stop from re-introducing herself. There was more in that file about her than even Sansa knew about herself.

_ Baelish _ , she mused, trying to place the name to a family before the war. It didn’t ring any bells — good or bad. There were a dozen prominent names throughout Westeros, way back from the times of lords and knights, Stark being one of them. Tully, too, though her aunt had fallen ill to madness and her uncle fallen to drink. Even whispered stories of long ago times didn’t herald a single mutter of a Baelish. Sansa hoped that was a good sign.

         She clasped her hands in her lap, squeezing her fingers tight enough even he could likely see how white they were from where he sat. “And this  _ tutoring _ ? Is it okay to ask  _ what _ exactly it will be?” 

         Baelish chuckled. “Of course. I don’t have a permission slip for you to fill out, but you’re welcome to leave at any point. Now, if you so choose.” His eyes held the unsaid,  _ Though I would prefer if you didn’t _ .

         Sansa couldn’t even imagine what else the Proctors could do other than what they’ve done already. Grueling challenges testing her mind, her body, and often both at once. So long as there was some question or puzzle — and other people around — Sansa managed well enough. But on her own in a situation requiring the delicate aim of weapons, or the quick speed of legs, or the brute force to push or pull or haul… Sansa wouldn’t last a minute out in the battlefield.

         “Will these be, um, normal? The normal sorts of things you already test?”

         “I can assure you,” he began, crossing his leg and leaning back in one smooth motion. Sansa always felt watched during her exams, but the look he was giving her right now was somehow more acute than during tests. He was watching her, yes, but more than usual. Which sounded mad. “Everything is very routine. We will start off with the, ah,  _ normal _ tests, as you put it. To get an accurate baseline of your abilities, though I can’t imagine there would be much disparity between these and your records. And from there we’ll determine where best to improve your skills. Not just areas of weakness, but your areas of strength. Like I said, there’s more needed than brute force to win a war. But it does help if war comes to fighting.”

         Sansa wasn’t sure what he meant — war  _ was _ fighting, was it not?

         Her thoughts popped an image of the elder Keeper, the one with half a face of gold. He commanded the army, she knew, and Sansa wondered if this tutoring was at his order. Sansa shivered at imagining working with him. Did Baelish think her mind was sharp enough to match the strategist? A five year war was grueling, yes, but it was one where the humans weren’t losing. Could Sansa ever match his intellect? Surely she wouldn’t match his experience in the ways of positioning troops or how best to lure away the enemy. 

         Imagine the end of the war attributed to some minor flaw in the robot’s defenses found only by her. 

         Sansa stopped the dream there. No point in getting carried away. That Keeper, at least, looked to know how to shoot a gun.

         “Any more questions?”

         Her tongue tickled with that new question — who asked for this training — but she dared to hear the truth. 

         “Yes?” He must have felt the questions bubbling out of her skin, even if her mouth was resolutely shut.

         She shook her head. 

         Baelish gave her a wearied smile, the closest to one her father sometimes gave her. It made Sansa wonder again who this Proctor left behind, trapped as he was within the Bunker, too. “You may speak freely in these sessions, Miss Stark. Despite what you may be thinking, no, you are not being watched any more than my eyes are doing right now.”

         Sansa hadn’t decided if that was reassuring or not. Still, she asked, “Are you  _ sure _ I’ll be ready?”

         Petyr smiled at her. It was not unlike the exasperated look her mother and father used to give her (or, so Sansa tried to remember). She was getting used to how his face looked with that fake thing plastered over it. “I promised that you would be, but if you would like to hear it again… Yes, Miss Stark, these training sessions will ensure that you are  _ ready _ .” He said the last word as a jab at the children he and the rest monitored and measured. Obviously there was a more  _ scientific _ or  _ militaristic _ term for it, but Sansa had held on to what she learned so long ago.  _ They’re making sure we’re ready to go back and meet mom and dad _ , she once lied to Arya.  _ It won’t be long before we see them again _ .

         Five years sure as all hells was a long time. 

         “Now,” Baelish continued, gathering the file from the desk and fishing out a pen from the depths of his jacket. It’s silver sheen caught the light,  _ click _ ing resoundly in the quiet. “If you don’t mind, I would like to ask  _ you  _ a few questions. Very standard things.”

         They were standard questions on her health, on her family’s health, and all of the small intricacies Sansa remembered being asked when she first arrived. The doctors back home always looked towards Cat or Ned for these sorts of answers, and though Sansa listened she never managed to remember the intricate weave of medical health and the like. 

         A horrible voice whispered:  _ They’re asking you because mom and dad are dead _ .

_ They’re not _ , she bit back. 

         “And your family?” Baelish’s pen was smooth as he wrote her last answer.

         Sansa kept her gaze on his fingers, watching them make loops and crosses. They paused for three seconds before tilting down as he awaited her response. Sansa looked up at him, finding a tilted head staring back at her. “What about them?”

         He shrugged. “Is there anything of note that you’ve not yet stated? Certain histories or affiliations?”

         Sansa worried what he might be insinuating, and she feigned childish ignorance. “None that I know of. I was...very young when I came here.”

         It satisfied the Proctor enough for him to scribble something else down. He made a show of flipping through her file, reading something, even though Sansa knew he must have read through her record plenty before this ‘official’ meeting. “And your sister? We have on file that she arrived the same time as you, and not a year later she went MIA.”

         A warning blared in her head. “And?”

         Baelish shrugged again, but it felt more forced than the last. “Would you know why she left, or where she might have gone?” He looked to say something else, but didn’t.

         Sansa’s gaze shot from where the pen’s nib waited up towards grey-green eyes that were waiting, too.  _ Surely he doesn’t think  _ I _ had something to do with Arya’s escape… _ No, of course not.  _ But he did just praise you for your wits _ , that voice murmured. 

         Was this instead a trial for her sister’s sin?

         Sansa shook her head. “Unfortunately, Arya didn’t tell me she was leaving.” Lies. “She made, um, remarks that she wanted to get out, but I never thought she would, or that she would find a way to escape.”

         Baelish’s hand was quick against the paper. Sansa was glad of her lies — who knew when this information would come back against her. “And would you have left if she  _ had _ told you?”

_ Yes, if I weren’t such a coward _ .

         “I don’t know. It was a very long time ago. She was scared.” Arya was only eleven, and more than scared. But more than courageous to get out.

         “One more question, and then we’ll begin the base exams,” he said by way of pausing this sudden interrogation. Sansa hadn’t said enough to account for how long he was writing. She silently thanked herself for being wise enough to lie.

         Unless that’s what he was expecting.

         Sansa picked at her cuff until she found the end of the thread. She was probably wrong — no one ever interrogated her before when Arya had first left, on account that no one had noticed she was gone until the next day when she failed to show for her exams. Sansa returned to the bunkroom before lunch to find the whole of it tossed apart as if by a storm. When Sansa came back after the last training, not at all looking forward to the surprise mess she would have to clean, someone had done it already.

         As well as got rid of Arya’s things.

         Sansa twirled that loose thread on her cuff and snagged it off.

         “And,” the Proctor said finally, clasping his fingers together with the pen stuck in the middle, gazing straight at (through) her. “Why do  _ you  _ want to leave?”

         Sansa felt the ghost of her arms around her, the brush of a voice against her hair. Between thrumming heartbeats, Sansa listened to the words:  _ we’ll see each other again, Sansa, I’m sure of it _ . 

         It was her father’s voice — a commanding tone full of love and longing. She saw the sun reflected in his eyes, carving out the the lines of his face. The heaviest lines were around Ned’s eyes: for smiling at his wife, his children. For loving them so much, the thought of saying goodbye — standing in the courtyard, a light scatter of snow in the air — for the last time.

         Sansa’s heart hurt. She thought she had forgotten what her mother sounded like.

         The vision lightened, fading from the warm greys and browns of Winterfell’s courtyard, to the harsh white and grey of the Bunker. Instead of Ned Stark staring at her with fondness, she was met with a Proctor’s gaze full of curiosity. 

         The balled-up thread fell through her fingers. Though ice flooded her veins at the memory, stopping movement and the possibility of movement, her eyes didn’t. They shot up towards the Proctor, who was still sitting opposite her in the same relaxed pose, one leg bent over the other. As though this line of questioning was routine for any child (Sansa was a child still, even if her age said otherwise. She had been full in the throes of childhood when they came to collect her and Arya). As though being caught up in a war was routine, as was training to fight in it. 

         As was training to die in it.

         She wouldn’t die. It wasn’t a hope, but a fact. Sansa wouldn’t die outside, because if she did, she would never find Arya again, or her brothers. She would never feel safe in her parent’s hug, or beneath her heavy quilts in her room in Winterfell.

         Only, there was a war going on outside. The ground was scarred black when she first entered the Bunker; was there anything left of it when she would finally leave?

         Yes.

         There had to be a world out there, and a Winterfell. And a family. 

         What else was there for her if there wasn’t?

         Sansa swallowed. Slowly, she felt feeling come back to her fingers, her limbs. Her chest still ached with longing, but Sansa managed a single, long breath. 

_ Don’t tell him the truth _ . 

         Never.

         So Sansa went with what she was expected to say: “Because I have to go outside.”

         Petyr looked up at her, his head still tilted. Thinking. Of what, she couldn't say. They were always thinking, the people who watched them and tested them and sent them outside to fight in a war that was started when they were barely children. The war had begun long before Sansa was called into this hell of concrete and metal. Maybe even before she was born, if she considered the Proctor’s musings on human hubris.

         And maybe it was the harsh lighting that set a crease between Petyr's eyes, caught behind the glimmer of his glasses. Quiet curiosity, or consternation.

         Or disappointment. 

         Sansa looked away first. 

         The Proctor stood, knees cracking softly (again betraying his age) as he set the file back atop the desk, the pen on top of that. He moved for the door, opening it in a silent gesture for Sansa to follow. In a tone harsher than before (or maybe it just sounded that way with the pounding ache in her bones), Baelish stated simply, “Now, let’s begin your baselines.”

         There was a flutter of an idea that Sansa had done something  _ wrong _ , allegedly confirmed in the way he was staring at her. It was the lighting, yes.

         Something possibly wrong, though she wasn’t sure what it was.

         However, Sansa  _ did  _ know with absolute certainty that she  _ hated _ that feeling.


	4. predictable patterns of response

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [And here’s the rest of that chapter, split in half only because I was lazy. Er, because I felt splitting it up would add to the ~drama~ Yeah.
> 
> Anyway! As I mentioned before, I’ll be on vacation for a few weeks! (am technically on it right now). Might get the writing urge (this or other projects) during my downtime, but if I disappear from here for a while, well, at least I have a solid excuse :P]

         “Tell me  _ everything _ .”

         Sansa froze. She was holding her tray of food, one foot over the trestle bench. She hadn’t realized she was in the cafeteria, let alone holding the solid metal tray, until just this moment. The burble of noises flittered into recognition, as did the harsh lighting and the curious waft of food and sweat. Sansa blinked, twice, and she felt the firmness of the bench beneath her foot and the way the tray dug into her palm. She relaxed her grip. Myranda’s words managed to pull her free of thoughts she didn’t realize were holding her hostage.

         Her friend’s excited curiosity was obvious from the way Myranda was staring at her with a smile not unlike a cat knowing how to get to the food when its owners were away. Maybe even something more devious than that. 

         But what was there to tell? It’s not like anything  _ really happened _ , anyway. 

         It was just...routine. Very routine.

         Sansa knew if she told herself that in the coming days then none of it would seem or feel  _ strange _ , and certainly not at all whatever Myranda’s grin was implying. (Days? Or would it take weeks? Months? Baelish didn’t mention exactly how long this training of hers would take.  _ As long as until you’re ready _ , she heard a voice whisper to her. The voice (though less abstract than the smoldering wisps of smoke after a target dummy met it’s unfortunate end at the hands of lasers) looked like smoke in her mind’s eye. The dull grey of it, burning, but tinged with color, too. Not red, or orange, but green).

         The Proctor took and interest in Sansa because she was brilliant. Not brilliant  _ enough _ to be sent out yet. But with his help… Sansa was still figuring out whether she should bother searching for Arya and her brothers, or go straight north back home. It was the prospect of feeling her mother’s comforting embrace again, to hear her father’s booming laugh whenever Arya did something ridiculous, to tease her brothers and be teased by them. All those fleeting memories were what drove Sansa to her best. And still her best wasn’t good enough. 

         Besides, there weren’t any other reasons to go outside.

         Well, not exactly.

         The war was...secondary to all of it. She wondered — and not for the first time — if it would even be  _ possible _ to run away to Winterfell. Not because it was far; the Bunker was somewhere in the South, though the night was dark and the rumbling of the truck covered the sounds of children’s sobbing when they arrived. But because, well, there would be  _ things _ trying to stop her from going. Desertion was, she gathered from training, worse than slaughtering your own kind. At least then you weren’t a coward.

         She wondered if Baelish would laugh at her if she told the truth. Oh,  _ of course _ he would. Any of them would. War was primary to the Keepers, and it wasn’t like they were giving the children extracurriculars outside of weapons and strategy and fitness.

         And she wondered why her chest grew tight at that notion of him laughing at her. 

         “Hell-lo? Earth to Sansa?”

         Sansa’s foot was still perched on the bench. Her tray of food was (thank the gods) still firmly in her hands and not splattered over her chest and legs. It was what they aptly referred to as  _ surprising soup _ , because they didn’t know what was in it until they took a spoonful. And after that even they didn’t _ want _ to know.

         With a sigh, Sansa sat and shrugged. She took more than enough time to rearrange her utensils and poke at the soup. “Nothing really happened, Randa.” There was  _ some _ kind of meat in the soup today. “It was, well, pretty  _ boring _ , actually. Pretty routine.”

         Myranda was nearly through with her food already, Sansa noticed. And she was showered. Sansa wasn’t, still wearing her sweaty uniform from the fitness they had that morning. Running laps was terrible but at least Myranda was terrible with her. Myranda, however, had the arm strength to counter for her weak legs. Sansa was just awful at it all, despite how much she tried to improve her strength. They had firearm training later, which Myranda mused as being a sick sort of meditation.  _ “It’s like yoga for the insane,” _ she said, admiring the work she made of the targets.  _ “At least, when what you’re shooting at isn’t moving.” _

         At least she could shoot things that weren’t. Sansa was lucky to nick the edges of the dummies with bullets. A graze wouldn’t stop an oncoming enemy — whether it was made of flesh or metal. Joints were the weak spots for any creature, they drilled into them. The enemy couldn’t shoot her if she could take their hand or arm out of commission. They couldn’t run either without their legs.

         Heads were priority when it came to the unliving. A robot would keep moving forward, even if it was nothing but a head with wires trailing from a shattered neck. Harry made the appropriate  _ Oh so they’re like zombies? _ Comparison each time this fact was brought up. 

         It wasn’t that they were (or were not) zombies; robots didn’t have a heart. Motors and circuits and wires filled their shells, but until their programming was absolutely destroyed their mission was single-minded: kill any and all humans. 

         The Keepers made sure their wards knew that from the moment they arrived. 

_ Wards _ , gods, Sansa didn’t like that word either. Wards, trainees, recruits — none of that removed the truth of the matter. 

         Children.

         There was hardly time for the kids during the day to just  _ be kids _ . Sansa couldn’t remember the last time she knitted, or watched a cheesy romcom, or spent all day at the mall trying on clothes and eating the free samples and trying (and failing) to cajole Arya into a dress. Anything  _ fun _ was beaten out of them. There was  _ free time _ as the Proctors and Keepers called it. Though Sansa had a feeling it was something required. By law, maybe; but more likely in order to make sure none of them went completely insane.

         Some of them had. A few never made it a week, stunted by the sudden change of their lives. She heard gossip that some kids found their way to the roof and jumped off, hoping their parents were down at the bottom waiting to catch them. They didn’t.

         Or the gossip that the war wasn’t even going on.  _ They’re just maniacal sick fucks using us like weapons _ , one boy whispered to her several years ago. He told that to everyone; Sansa saw him at a different table each lunch. At least, until she didn’t see him at all.

         She  _ unfortunately _ knew that wasn’t true. Their truck careened out of the way of a wayward missile. It took three days longer than expected to arrive at the Bunker, and none of them slept the rest of the way back. Each echoing shot sounded closer than it was, and each pothole was a supposed landmine waiting to blow them up into a million unidentifiable pieces. The younger children wept and wept, and no amount of lying that  _ Mommy and daddy are waiting for you when we arrive _ would silence them.

         “Girl, I swear,” Myranda began, wiping up the last of her soup with crusty bread. “You have a strange definition of  _ boring _ , and  _ oh don’t worry, nothing’s happened, except for being taken after by one of the Proctors on a deeply personal level _ .” Myranda had done her best impression of Sansa, though Sansa mentally wouldn’t give her more than a five out of ten.

         She tentatively sipped the hot food, thankful it didn’t burn. “I’m serious.”

         “And so am I.”

         “I don’t know why you keep thinking there’s  _ more _ when there wasn’t. He asked me questions about my medical history, and my family’s history. He checked my eyes and ears and all that. It was basically like a doctor’s visit.”

         “In that case, why don’t they do a personal training for every one of us? All I’m saying is that there’s  _ something _ going on other than a basic check-up.”

         “Look, I don’t know what you  _ think _ might be happening, or will be happening. But Baelish isn’t—"

         “ _ Baelish _ ?” Myranda cocked an eyebrow up. It was lost in the damp tangle of her bangs. “Oh, you’re on a actual-name basis with him now, are you?”

         “Myranda,  _ please _ .” Sansa was exasperated. Why, she couldn’t say. Myranda was just trying to make light of their wonderfully (and too-long) existence in the Bunker. Sansa was just...tired, she supposed.

         “Oh,  _ come. On _ .” Myranda squashed in close, lowering her voice. “Look, I’m not trying to piss you off, girl. Really. But you need to listen to me. I’m older than you, so  _ technically _ , you gotta listen to your elders.” That, at least, eased the tension enough for Sansa to release her death-grip on her spoon. “Surely you know there’s something, I don’t know, something going on. You’re great, but  _ why _ would they start off this ‘extra training’—" she air-quoted, “all of a sudden without doing a proper announcement and all that. Don’t you think it’s a little weird?”

_ Yes, it is _ . Sansa just tried to tell herself it wasn’t. It was nothing but routine. 

         Myranda continued. “Besides. Don’t you think, uh what’s his name—"

         “Baelish,” Sansa supplied.

         “Yeah, him. Don’t you think he’s doing it, you know…”

         “He’s a Proctor,” Sansa said, as if that was supposed to clear it all up. “He’s  _ supposed _ to be watching us and testing us. That’s what they do.”

         Myranda pursed her lips. “And…?”

         Sansa swirled her spoon lazily in her soup. “‘And’, what?”

         Myranda rolled her eyes with a sigh. “I swear to the Stranger, girl, you better be joking with me.” They way she said it made it poignantly clear what Myranda expected it to be. “I doubt even the other Proctors, or hells, the Keepers, know about it.”

         Probably not. It was something Sansa thought about before, too. But if it meant getting out of here into the real world, well, it wasn’t something she was going to pass up on.

         Sansa glanced around the room. Other children were glancing their way. Some were doing it secretly: from the corners of their eyes, from behind a cascade of bangs. Others weren’t trying to be anything other than obvious.

         She and Myranda were being quiet enough, and there was noise enough to block out their whispers. But that wasn’t it, Sansa realized. It was the seat across from them, unusually empty and cold.

         Harry had made it to the outside world. Surely something was  _ wrong _ . Surely something was happening at this table that made them ready before others who should be. And surely all the eyes staring at her were trying to figure out  _ how _ .

         Sansa suddenly hoped none of the others could hear them.

         Sansa managed to shake a few inches between her and her friend under the guise of needing to eat. The stew tasted blander than usual; because of her nerves or not, she couldn’t confirm. “Look, I’m just saying that what  _ you _ think is gonna happen isn’t. This isn’t a movie — I’m not going to  _ fall in love _ with the Proctor, and he’s not going to change his ways because he _ loves me  _ too. We’re not gonna blow this place off and run away from the war and live happily ever after.” It was obvious her life  _ was _ a book, but none of the good ones. 

         Myranda (thankfully) kept her voice quiet. She had to feel the weight of all those eyes on them, too. “And  _ I’m _ just saying that no one’s caught the attention of the Proctor before who wasn’t already ridiculously jacked or murderous. No offence, Sans, but your brains won’t do you much good out on the battlefield if you can’t run or at least aim.”

         “I don’t  _ want _ to go on the battlefield,” Sansa responded quickly.

         And regretted. 

         “I don’t think it’s where I’d be best,” she added, hoping to erase the budding curiosity on Myranda’s face. Surely Sansa couldn’t be the only one who was selfish to go outside and not fight (and die) in the war. But that’s because she had family, a home, things to look forward to that weren’t destroyed. Myranda had her father, she knew, and some friends and a quiet home in the mountains. Myranda didn’t talk about them much, and Sansa figured she must not care.

         Then again, Sansa kept her memories close to her chest. Everyone must be doing the same.

         “ _ Where _ would be best, then?” Myranda asked.

         Sansa shrugged. “The… I don’t know.” This might be worse than admitting she was going North the minute she had the chance. “I’m better at thinking and planning than any of the physical stuff.”

         “And you think ol’ Half-Face is gonna take you under his wing after, uh, Baelish is done with you?”

         Sansa didn’t like the way her friend said that. “Probably not. They probably don’t even want us to be…”  _ anything other than their pawns _ , Sansa finished in her head. 

         Her friend heard the unspoken words. Myranda grabbed her empty glass and twirled it in her hands, leaving smears in the condensation. “Well, I hope it works.”

         Sansa forced herself to eat most of the soup, tasting none of it. 

         They sat in silence for a few minutes, and Sansa (as covertly as she could) looked around. The same people were watching them. She wondered if it was paranoia that made the cafeteria sound quieter, or made the walls look like they were closing in around them.

         Definitely the paranoia. Or maybe it was just the surprise in the stew today.

         “What’s your idea,” she said finally, pushing the tray away. There was only so much she could stomach. It wasn’t the cook’s fault — sometimes the trucks supplying the Bunker never made it, and they would have to make do with whatever food was left.

         “About?”

         “About... _ this _ ,” Sansa said, suggesting the whole ordeal of the conversation since she sat down.

         Myranda shrugged her shoulders. “I’m just saying… Well… Humans weren’t supposed to love robots, either, and look what they’ve done. Whole streets and alleys full of broken things. Granted, neither of you are broken and neither of you are robots, but still.”

         “What are you getting at?” Sansa said through her teeth. She had a horrible feeling she knew, but she’d shut her friend down enough this afternoon. That, and she didn’t want any undue attention their way, more than was given already.

         “I’m just saying people have done dumb shit before, and I doubt you or this Proctor are any exception.” Myranda set the glass down, cleaning her hands with the condensation. “Look, I joke around a lot, and I am a little sorry for early. Oops. But, I  _ do _ know what I saw, and I’ve seen that Proctor look at you before. I’ll admit I creep to see who’s proctoring me whenever we’re training, and we know they’re random. Speaking of, Toucan hasn’t been around recently, I don’t know what happened to her.”

         “Do you have a point, Randa?” Sansa wasn’t angry, but she was tired.

         “Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there. I’m just saying, Sans, whenever we’re training together, I’ve noticed Baelish up at the desks more and more. I assumed he was a perv like Santa Creep, always  _ conveniently _ staring at my boobs. But this — him calling you for some  _ private _ sessions and filling your head with promises — I’m equally excited for you, but also kinda scared.”

         Sansa opened her mouth to reply, but she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t pay much mind to the Proctor, only that Sansa made sure she looked good. Or as good as she could be. Their voices were muddled by the tinny speaker. Sansa didn’t listen to who was speaking, only that they were praising her.

         “So,” she began, licking her lips. “Are you, or are you not, worried about me? Because it sounded earlier like you were teasing me.”

         “I mean, I was, just a little. That’s what friends are for.”

         “Hm”.

         “Girl, if you’re  _ absolutely certain _ that I’m wrong and am just being a little paranoid,” Myranda began, with absolute doubt about Sansa’s position, “then tell me this.  _ Why _ would he corner  _ you _ of all people?” 

_ Because I’m good _ , Sansa wanted to say. She didn’t, because she knew if she  _ was _ good she would have been out of here by now. And Baelish’s compliments on her 

         The truth crept up onto her tongue:  _ I don’t know _ .

         “You  _ motherfucker! _ ”

         Sansa startled in her seat. Her water glass fell, diluting her soup further. Reflexes kicked in, telling her to run away, but Myranda’s hand was on her arm.  

         “Oh shit,” her friend murmured. She was facing behind them. Sansa looked back, too.

         Thoughts of the Proctor with curiosity in his eyes left her mind in favor of the fight. Myranda was staring, too, as was every other person in the room.

         “You fucker!” a boy about Sansa’s age screamed, his voice echoing against the concrete. Garrold, she thought his name was. He stood, his chair clattering behind him.

         “It wasn’t  _ me _ , dipshit!” another boy countered. He scooted back, his chair screeching louder than his words. That was...Robert? Randall? Something with an R, Sansa thought.

         “You’re trying to make me look bad, ya piece of shit!” Garrold snarled. He was rounding the tables straight for not-Robert. 

         Not-Robert looked terrified, but he let loose a strangled laugh. “As if I gotta try to make  _ you _ look like shit.”

         Garrold lunged with a snarl over a table (its occupants jumped away, fleeing to the edges of the cafeteria). Not-Robert dodged, sprinting between the tables. Sansa felt the air as he rushed past, followed closely by Garrold.

         Sansa felt Myranda’s hand on her shoulder, urging her to find her food more interesting than the fighting. Sansa knew she should, too, but curiosity won out. That, and practically everyone else was enamored with the sudden row that was circuiting the cafeteria.

         Guards didn’t show up, not as Garrold shoved Not-Rober over a table. Plates and silverware clattered on the concrete. They were children, without the comfort of their family and homes — it wasn’t odd for tensions to rise high enough to explode into fists. Sansa wished she knew what sparked the fight. 

_ The guards are  just running late _ , Sansa thought, watching Not-Robert squirm away from Garrold’s grip. They rolled over along the table until they fell onto the floor, Garrold on the bottom. The impact loosened his grip on Not-Robert, who flung himself off. Garrold spat obscenities, half of them a derivation of  _ fucker _ .

         Still the guards were away. Those old machinations were alert to any commotion, fights included. They would slide from the hidden passages in the walls, appearing and disappearing as they were needed. Sometimes when Sansa was walking through the Bunker, she swore she could hear the muffled clatter of their boots echoing around her. Harry joked she was mad.  _ Just the pipes, probably _ , he said, shoving her shoulder.  _ Unless this place is haunted _ .

         Haunted, yes, but not in the norm. Children’s spirits lurked around them. They couldn’t go home alive or dead, and so they crept along the hallways and corridors. Sansa shivered randomly as she walked around, and it took all her willpower not to turn around.

         “I swear to the fucking gods,” Garrold began, unfinishing his words as he and Not-Robert danced this way and that around a table. Not-Robert was poised to dodge if Garrold lunged again.

         He did.

         Only Not-Robert wasn’t as prepared as he thought.

         He fell onto the concrete with a resounding  _ whack _ , loud enough to leave an echo. Sansa cringed, her hand moving up to her own head to make sure she was okay.

          “Motherfucker, think you could sabotage me? I’m so much fucking better than your piece of shit ass!” Garrold had one hand on Not-Robert’s throat. His other met Not-Robert’s face, over and over, each  _ thwack _ somehow louder than the first. “The only way your sorry excuse would ever get outta here was ‘cause they changed these gods-damned rules!”

         Sansa didn’t think Not-Robert could hear. She blinked away her tears, praying that no one saw them. It wasn't acceptable to cry, least of all over something as trivial as a cafeteria bout. 

         Myranda — who had been an angry mess yesterday having said their last goodbye to a good friend (no matter how much Sansa told herself they would see Harry again, the logical part of her mind said with complete apathy that she was wrong) — was staring at the commotion like everyone else. Like it was nothing more than a bit of sport, or a break from the humdrum of their training.

         Like it didn't matter that someone was getting the shit knocked out of him over something stupid.

         Worse than her tears was the insistent tug to  _ help them.  _ Her body moved to shove Garrold aside and see if Not-Robert was okay. Myranda’s hand was still on her shoulder, firm and resolute. Sansa pushed against it. Maybe she could help. Maybe she could do  _ something _ . 

         But it wouldn’t matter. 

         Not-Robert was still unconscious when Garrold grabbed his unresisting head in both hands and smashed it on the concrete. 

         Sansa clasped her hands over her mouth, stifling her cry. The sight of brain and skull shooting out from Not-Robert’s head was enough to pull her gaze away. She was met instead with the indeterminate lumps in her stew, too much like the lumps oozing out from a shattered skull. Sansa bit back bile.

         She felt a hand on her arm. “Are you—" Myranda began, cutting her own question short with a shake of her head. 

         Sansa looked up at her friend with one hand over her mouth and the other furiously scrubbing at her eyes. Myranda’s face was grim, and though she had been visibly unhappy since Harry was sent out (though she did her best to hide it, to Sansa’s poised obliviousness to her friend), she wasn’t crying. Myranda looked  _ confused _ if anything.

         “I’m just—" Sansa got out, upset that her voice was shaking. She didn’t bother speaking anything else. 

         She looked at the table across from her, the one next to it, the people standing along the walls in fear of being mowed down by Garrold. 

         Everyone was still transfixed on the sight behind her (Sansa could see that single second of the impact, over and over, regardless if her eyes were open or not).

         No one else was crying.

         The cafeteria was silent, eerily so. Garrold’s ragged breaths were loud. Sansa heard her own heart hammering, and wondered if anyone else could hear it.

         Another hammering echoed, louder and louder until doors slammed open. Guards trampled into the room finally, their footfalls a sudden thrum in the deafening stillness that followed watching a boy’s head get smashed against the floor. Sansa shook her head. It was still there, replaying, and it more gruesome with each remembering.

         “Gods…” came Myranda’s whispered voice through the din of the guards. She was still watching the scene, almost transfixed. Everyone else was, or those that hadn’t turned away. There were muffled sobs and muttered swears. No one moved or ate. They just watched the guards inspect the scene: Garrold heaving, his hands and shirt bloody, and Not-Robert staring up at the ceiling. Sansa chanced a look and regretted it. A slice of skull tore up through one of Not-Robert’s eyes.

         Her stomach rolled again.

         Fights weren’t uncommon, Sansa knew. She just...hadn’t seen something like  _ this _ . They never got this wildly out of hand so quickly.

         One guard grabbed Garrold off of the body, lifting him up and declaring him fit for the medical ward at the sight of blood. He went with the machination, staring at his shaky hands. Rage overtook him, and Sansa wondered what he was feeling. He didn’t look pleased as he passed their table. 

         The other guards collected the bits of Not-Robert’s skull and brain, righted the tables and chairs, and took in the sight of the rest of the cafeteria. No one else was injured; physically, at least. She heard someone throw up.

         Sansa swallowed her own bile that kept creeping up her throat. It burned, and nothing she would do would make her consider eating anything else today, regardless of how hungry she knew she truly was. 

         Two guards picked up the limp body out with a third cupping the remnants of Not-Robert’s head in its hands. They were unfazed by the sight because they weren’t programmed to be unfazed by it. Sansa wondered, suddenly, if it was better not to feel.

         And she knew, by the gods, she definitely was not going to the battlefield. Not when  _ this _ was the least of her concerns. It was going to be  _ worse _ , so much worse, when human heads would explode from the unfeeling hands of robots. It was ironic, then, that these old guard marks were cradling the dead boy’s body. 

         With a final assessment, the guards left the way they came, their footfalls heavy against the quiet. She wondered if there would always be an off-colored stain there on the concrete. It was an effort to keep her eyes from wandering to find other  _ examples _ of human nature splattered across the rooms.

         Her eyes trailed across the perimeter of the room, taking in each of the children’s faces. Those that could manage to stare looked horrified. One or two were  _ excited _ , Sansa noted with disgust (and a bit of fear). But the rest looked like how she felt. 

         Except, there was one that didn’t fit in with the rest.

         Sansa’s eyes shot back to the far corner. A gasp fell from her lips.

         Petyr Baelish was standing against the wall, watching the commotion. He stood behind a cluster of kids murmuring about what just happened, not privy to the fact that there was a Proctor right behind them. The wall behind him was sealed. 

         Even when they weren't assessing them during training, the Proctors were always watching them. 

         What would they think of this scene? Of watching their  _ test subjects _ struggle against one another to the point where one of them had to win? Even when the prize was so garishly horrible... 

         Perhaps it was only another mark on their reports:  _ Human children prove fatal when locked up with each other for prolonged periods of time. Worse still is the aggression when the criteria for success is changed arbitrarily- _

         (Sansa hated the growing thought that Harry’s release into the battlefield was part of this wicked experiment in her mind. That things like this — someone dying, and so brutally — was only a curiosity waiting to be sated by adults. Adults who truly didn’t care whether the children they monitored where ready or not. They would all be dead by mechanical hands, anyways. Harry must have been ready. Just...not in whatever way she could think of).

         - _ further experimentation required. Future fatalities an almost certainty _ .

         She swallowed the idea down her throat, hoping it would burn apart in the bile.

         Sansa looked up at the Proctor again, curious what his face might say about the thoughts underneath. Maybe she could read him, even at this distance. Find those notes in the way his eyes must be trailing over the scene, over each of the children, over the silence and the stillness at all of them just  _ watching _ as it happened.

         Except...

         She resisted the urge to look away in the knowing headjerk of being caught looking. He didn’t have that problem. No matter how many times Sansa tried to covertly land her attention on that part of the wall and the soft grey uniform that blended in against it, she found a gaze staring back at her.

         No.

         Myranda — as loathe as Sansa was to admit it — had been right.

         He wasn’t watching the other children, or assessing the room in the aftermath of the commotion. He likely hadn’t seen a lick of the fight or the finality of Not-Robert’s head caving in. 

         He was watching  _ her _ .

 


	5. a thousand battles, a thousand victories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Apologies for the wait from the last chapter! I had hella fun on vacation and getting back into the swing of a story is always a bit difficult (especially now that we’re at the end of the year). That and I got pretty sick for a while, and then got some new video james, but I’m better now!
> 
> Also I hope all of you who like this story haven’t forgotten it... I’ve decided to split this in half (with the intention that the 2nd part will be up soon). Just to add to the drama and tension. I guess. (and I'm lazy lol) ]

              Sansa stared at her army in vain. She’d lost half of her soldiers, and her paramedic was surrounded by the enemy. Her gunners were shot, and the saboteur wasn’t going to make it back to safety in time to keep her from dying.

              The bottom corner of her lip was bitten raw. Sansa gnawed at it even now, despite the stinging pain. Over and over her eyes roamed the battlefield before her. Her army was in shambles, with the enemy grinning at her with blank faces as though they knew exactly what her mind was whispering to her. She didn’t want to listen to it. There had to be something,  _ anything _ . Sansa realized she hated losing as much as she hated not being able to pass all of the exams and tests for Proctors set for them. Maybe more so. 

              There had to be  _ something  _ she could do. Some way to get out of this. Some way not to  _ lose.  _

              A quick glance up at the man sitting opposite her. He leaned as far back in his chair as the rigid things would allow, one hand propping up his head with a finger gently nudging at his bottom lip. Relaxed was an understatement.  _ Confident _ , in that he knew he was moments away from victory. And his eyes — shadowed in the harsh lighting — remained on her. He was watching  _ her _ , observing her like the specimen she was. It was a feeling that should have made her uncomfortable (or at least, unnerved) as it had when she spied him doing it the first time. It was, she assumed, protocol, for the Proctor to monitor them during lessons. 

_ And what about outside of their official lessons…? _

              Sansa still hadn’t the nerve to ask him about it. She wasn’t sure if she was overreacting or not. They watched all the children here, that was obvious. For their (alleged) safety, and more for ensuring the new recruits were shaping up to the soldiers they needed. She wondered how often they tested them without them knowing, without the oddly comfortable stale walls and white lights and silent gaze. 

              Perhaps it wasn’t the norm because extra lessons like this weren’t the norm, either.

              To the left of them sat a clock, silently ticking down the seconds. Her time was quickly running out: twenty seconds. Nineteen unticking seconds to figure out how to get her pieces out of check. Eighteen, sweeping over the position of her paramedic, her saboteur, her remaining soldiers; the line of those captured on the other side of the battlefield. Dead.

              Petyr had been flattering her the first day of her private lessons (when he went through her file and interrogated her about Arya). Exulting her intelligence yadda yadda, saying she could be as good as the head tacticians should she prepare and focus enough.

              This, however, was ridiculous. 

              “I…” she began. Her tooth dug in deeper into her lip, and she tasted the telltale metallic tinge that she was wearing a hole. Again. Sansa clenched her left hand, letting her fingernails dig deep into the flesh of her palm (her hand, at least, wasn’t bleeding). They slid into the grooves there already. Her right hand, meanwhile, hovered above the board. This piece, or that one, or... 

              Baelish raised an eyebrow, letting that ask the question he didn't say:  _ Do you give up?  _

              Five seconds. 

              The paramedic was a goner. The saboteur could take out one of his soldiers, but not the other. Her own soldiers were scattered, leaving her king alone. Maybe she could put  _ his _ king in an undesirable position instead. Maybe she could-

              The clock buzzed her defeat. 

              “Shit.” Sansa leaned back in her chair with a heavy sigh. She couldn't take her eyes off the board laid out with her loss. It hadn't been checkmate — Baelish preferred to leave her in an impossible check that  _ looked _ like checkmate. It was better for learning, he said. Very rarely would she be in a position with absolutely no exits. There was always  _ something _ , always a way out. Unconventional, usually, but better than willingly hanging her head for the executioner. So he said.

              “I could have the pieces explode, too, if you'd prefer the full ambiance.”

              Sansa looked up at him. It was a joke, she knew by the faint tilt of his mouth. “No, that's—"  _ ridiculous _ , "—fine. The clock is enough.”

              The clock was a recent addition. The stress of knowing she only had so long to figure out her move. That, and the gnawing fear of that damned buzzer.  _ Failure, failure, failure _ it rang. Even now she heard the tinny wail bouncing in against her skull. She shook her head.

              As if that wasn’t enough, Baelish turned his gunner-slash-rook to face her king. He shifted his pawn/soldier out of the way, leaving Sansa's king cornered with no way out save for the path of the gunner. Her pieces were too scrambled around the board, or dead. “Would you like me to explain what you could have done?”

_ No _ , was the truth of it, because Sansa hated being explained how wrong she was, as though this was simple arithmetic and the Proctor was weary of explaining how numbers worked. “Yes,” she said instead. Because she wasn’t going to get better unless she could sort out all these impossible rules and actually  _ win _ .

              And again, and again. Maybe that would prove her worthy of something better than the monotony of training.

              Petyr raised an eyebrow, catching the tone in her voice. He didn’t mention it. “Here,” he pointed to her stranded paramedic (it was a bishop, in truth). The Proctor had it cornered, too. It was the second most vital piece only to the king, and only because the king determined win or loss. Sansa had given it up for dead once his knights/airmen scooted it to the opposite corner, keeping it stuck between them and bombs (also a new addition to chess). It was her last bishop, and she didn’t want to lose it. “You cannot assume that a piece is dead just because it’s surrounded. What good is it if you aren’t using it? Better to have tried something and sacrificed it than let it rot surrounded.”

              “In a den of lions,” Sansa muttered. 

              He heard her. “Yes, quite. But if you know how to corral lions — or come prepared with some tasty meat — then you can lure yourself free.”

              “And which piece represents the choice cut steaks...?” She didn’t know where this sudden haughtiness came from. Probably from losing; it was a better alternative than flipping the board over, pieces and all.

              He laughed through his nose. “Unfortunately, this set is lacking in that. I’ll petition the designer for a new set of rules.” Petyr began clearing the board in preparation for another test (‘test’, not ‘game’, because she was training, and gods smite them both if the Keepers knew they were doing anything remotely  _ fun _ ). 

              “A ridiculous set,” Sansa swore under her breath, moving to clean up her side.

              Petyr cocked his head towards her, hands frozen in the air. Her captured pieces sat in his fingers — a fair amount of pieces, she thought bitterly. “Is something the matter, Ms Stark?”

              The biggest matter was she was still  _ here _ and not outside, running north back home.

              The matter at the moment was she was here playing chess. She said as much.

              The Proctor chuckled once, his hands resuming. All of the pieces clattered into the bag beside the chess board. It was velvet and clean, as though either Petyr just bought it (doubtful; they were in the middle of war, who had time to buy games?), or rarely used (because chess wasn’t really a game you could play by yourself). “This is a _game_ , you're not wrong on that account. But it’s also not. The military has used games like chess and cyvasse and xianqi since we first found the thrill in hurting each other in large groups. It’s for _thinking_. A limited imitation of war, to be sure.”

              He held the bag open for her to deposit her remaining pieces and the miraculous few she captured. Sansa did as she was silently instructed, carefully placing them in one at a time to limit their clanking. 

              “It’s not the same chess my father taught me,” she said, keeping her arms on the table and not crossing them over her chest like a petulant loser. Chess back home hadn't been the game of choice to spend cold winter nights huddled around the fire in the living room. Mostly because her brothers preferred video games to board games. Or because Rickon insisted on playing  _ his _ board games, which didn’t require much thought.

              “War is the same.”

              “To chess?” she blurted out.

              Petyr nodded. He hefted the bag with both hands and gave it a solid shaking. Clattering filled the air, like shattered concrete raining down on the ground. It reminded Sansa when she failed in bomb diffusing not long ago. She still had the scar along her left forearm where the rebar nicked her skin. No one had died (there were  _ some  _ extremes even the Keepers wouldn't allow). But outside, when  _ real  _ people were counting on her?

              Like chess, Sansa wasn't  _ as good  _ as she needed to be. Even though she planned to desert the battlefield for a route North, she couldn't get out until she proved herself. 

              And that meant winning chess against this Proctor. 

              Setting the bag back on the table, Petyr turned the opening away from both of them. He then handed her the dice (it went up to twenty, the paint on the numbers warn). “There’s time enough for one more game.”

              Sansa couldn’t say  _ no _ , not when this was (somehow) meant to make her ready for the outside world come the next call. That, and it was preferable to the physical training she had to do. A game of chess beat clambering over ruined walls any day.

              She listened to the dice bounce on the table. 

              Luck was on her side this game. She rolled for fifteen pieces whilst Petyr had twelve. It wasn't much, but the advantage would at least keep Sansa's side alive long enough to figure out how to pierce his defenses. 

              First they selected their king (this was one of the few remaining rules of actual chess they kept. Each side had a king, and losing the king meant losing the game). They then took turns drawing pieces out of the bag. The rule was to take the first piece touched, without feeling for the ones they wanted. Two complete sets of pieces lay in there, and Sansa lucked out on three knights and bishops one round. That was one of the few times she beat Baelish, to which he then added the timer. 

              He was always adding rules, claiming war to be as unpredictable as this game of really bad chess. There was another dice, a regular six-sided one, that sat unused. Sansa wondered what inane rule he would come up with about that. She didn't like that it was the color of blood. 

              They arranged their pieces on the board. Another rule (or lack thereof?) was placing pieces however they wanted on their two rows. The king was ideally in the back surrounded by good pieces. At least, that's how Sansa operated. If she couldn't let her king be captured it made sense to prevent the Proctor from capturing it. 

              Admittedly, she wasn't as good as that once Petyr threw away the rigid rules. 

              She had two queens and he had none. Petyr loved the queen piece, she realized. For good reason — the queen could do everything that the king couldn't. The saboteur moved where she wanted on the board, the king stuck shuffling one square at a time. Even in normal chess, played with a roaring fire and huddled beneath furs, Sansa knew the queen was an important piece. And she had two of them. She didn't want to get her hopes up, but looking at each side of the battlefield...she knew she was going to win. 

              Sansa was given the honors of rolling for first move, and she won it (another sign of her victory?). She’d been graced with enough ‘good’ pieces that she only had to decide between three pawns to shuffle forward. She hit the timer a little too eagerly.

              Baelish moved quickly each round. Sansa preferred analyzing the board with her allotted sixty seconds, hoping the time would help uncover the best route forward. It rarely worked, given her poor win-to-lose ratio. Somehow, Petyr could read the board in ten seconds (and still win).

              They were a few rounds in when he asked, “Are you enjoying this game, at least?”

              Sansa blinked up at him. It wasn’t usual for the Proctors to ask personal question, even if this wasn’t too personal. Was this part of the testing? 

              “Yes,” she admitted. Because it  _ was _ fun, in the sense that during these minutes she oft forgot the chess was meant to improve her tactics for the actual war. “Though, if I may be honest, it’s a far cry from actual chess. This is more like...really bad chess.” 

              They played in silence for a few turn after that, though Sansa noticed something like a smile on the Proctor’s lips. 

              “ _ Really bad chess _ it might be, as you’ve said,” he began, throwing a pawn in the midst of her pieces. Sansa tried to understand what he was doing: a trap? Or an actual tactic to steal her position? “But soldiers don’t line up in neat lines on either side of the field anymore. Your enemy could have twice as many men as you, and where you least expect them. They could pull a front of being weaker than they actually are. They could have spies and traitors in your army.”

              Sansa decided to let that pawn slide, focusing on taking out his pieces one by one. She shifted a knight.

              He nodded slightly. Was he expecting that? Should she have taken out that pawn instead? “You have to consider all possibilities. And then, two or three steps past those.”

              “Sounds like a lot of thinking…”

              The smiled returned for a second. “It is. But a bit of thought is better than being dead.”

              That killed the moment (was it really one?), and silence fell on them save for the faint buzzing of the lights above. Once, Sansa thought she heard something even fainter shifting between the walls. Like a ghost, or a rat. It was probably just the pipes.

              “And you?”

              Baelish’s gaze flicked up to hers. He looked determined, pathing all those possibilities on the board. “And me what?”

              Sansa chewed on her inner cheek, wondering where the question came from. As though they were friends, or a teacher and a student. Not a soldier and their doctor, prepping Sansa for her brief life outside. If she was lucky and she couldn’t escape, she hoped her death was quick. “Do you enjoy playing shitty chess over and over again?”

              The lines around his eyes softened. She decided he looked kinder without them — and with a smile — than with. Maybe (she reasoned) it was that comforting illusion of not being in the midst of war that egged her to bring it forth. As though, if she squinted hard enough, she could imagine she  _ was _ back in Winterfell, her father across from her, her siblings eagerly waiting for their turn. In the distance, the aroma of a fresh cooked dinner. The warmth of the fire crackling beside them.

              She blinked, and she saw the Proctor, the white walls behind him. 

              “I suppose there are worse things to be doing than this,” he said finally, shifting his bishop. “Here, there’s a lot less running and jumping involved than other tests.”

_ Tests _ — it echoed in her head. “Good.”

              Baelish noticed that shift in her mood — she could tell from the way the fingers jerked, very minutely, over his pawn — and said nothing about it. 

_ There’s no use making friends with him _ , came the reasonable part of her brain.  _ You’re just using each other. _

              Sansa looked at him: the streaks of grey in his hair, the shape of his jaw, the worn cuff of the sweater he wore beneath his coat. He forewent his glasses during chess matches. Was that a gift from his wife, and how long ago did it stop smelling like her? Was she even alive, this imaginary woman? Sansa wondered what she would look like. What kind of person would this Proctor — who so rarely smiled actual smiles, and who knew more about winning chess than even the Keepers — fall for?

_ If I’m using him to get out of here, then how is he using me... _

              She saw him, again, this time on the other side of the chaos in the cafeteria.

              “There's also the possibility of desertion.”

              Sansa blinked back to the present. Did he know…?

              He held up the blood-red die between two fingers. Instead of the 6 lay a skull-and-crossbones. How ominous. With precision, he transferred the die between his fingers. Tossed it up to catch it, rolling it in his palm. Like a thick bead of blood. “It’s your turn, Ms Stark.”

              It was. She had forty-nine seconds left. The board was growing more haphazard, and Petyr matched her capture for capture. Even with a smaller army, he wasn’t going down easily. Her paramedics (two left) sat on opposite sides of the field. She left her queens with the king, afraid what might happen to them should they got lost in the tangle of Petyr’s pieces. But there were ten seconds left, and she had to make a move. The queen would survive; and if not, she had another. 

              Sansa didn’t look up at the Proctor, afraid she made a bad move. She asked, still mulling over her situation, “Shouldn’t I be playing against a robot?”

              Baelish’s fingers hopped between his gunner and his remaining airman. “Why’s that?” In the end, he decided on the airman, flying onto the other side of her queen. Like bait, she thought.

              “I mean, they think differently, don’t they?”

              “Yes, and no.”

              There was more there, she knew, and she waited for him to expand on it. Petyr instead nudged her with his stare, not replying until Sansa looked up at him. And even then, he waited a few heartbeats. Assessing her. Something heavy fell from her chest to her stomach. “Robots are more methodical than humans, assuming you know their rules.”

              “And you do?”

              Baelish (without looking down at the board) shifted a pawn into her line of pawns. It stood out, white in the black. His fingers groped along the face of the clock, finding the button to reset it to sixty seconds. Except he held it down, pausing the timer. “Of course not. But chess was a starting point to teach them strategy and logic. In a second they can parse out every possibility and figure out the best move twenty rounds from now to win. Or, in some cases, bypass the twenty rounds and go straight for your king, so long as the rules say they can’t.”

              She thought she understood. Maybe. Not really. 

              “Computers can  _ only _ do what the user tells them. They can learn, yes, but they can’t  _ create _ . It’s been a flaw since we first made them. Once you’ve figured out what their programming is telling them to do, then you can counteract it.”

              “They  _ can _ create things, though, can’t they?” she interrupted. Sansa waded through the fuzziness of her brain for the word. “Neural networks and, and things?”

              Baelish nodded at her. “Yes, and no. Neural networks — and in essence, what makes humanoid robots now behave the way they do, well beside the murdering bit — is learning from hundreds and thousands of examples. They pick up patterns. They figure out what a dog is, for example, from looking at a million pictures of dogs. They understand how to. But creating things, making something up from scratch without basis to go off on? Well, children have them beat there. It’s like PIcasso.” Petyr set down the dice he’d been rolling around in his other hand.

              There was way too much to unpack, and Sansa was getting dizzy from it all. Petyr finally removed his hand from the timer, motioning her to take her turn. She did.

              “You’ve heard of the laws of robot?” Petyr asked on his next turn. When Sansa didn’t immediately nod  _ yes _ or  _ no _ , the Proctor continued. “Years and years ago, before we had robots, people were afraid of them. Mostly thinking they would come alive and kill us, which to be fair to our forefathers, they weren’t wrong.” He almost laughed at something that Sansa didn’t catch. “Anyways. The three laws. One. Robots can’t let us come to harm, whether willfully or not. Two. Robots must listen to us, unless the order would hurt us. Three. Robots must protect their own selves so long as that protection doesn’t violate the first or second law.” He held up a finger for each law. They curled down around that same knight, scooting closer to her king.

              “So they can’t harm or kill us, no matter what,” Sansa reiterated. She shifted her knight past his row of pawns (he had twice as many as her, lacking in the non-pawn pieces). “Where did things go wrong?”

              Again, the Proctor smiled the beginning of a laugh, not finishing it. “What made you say things went  _ wrong _ rather than something else?”

              “Well.” Robots wanted to  _ kill them _ . It was the singular truth droned in her head the moment she arrived. Before that. On their radio and televisions back home (few people in the North had implanted telecoms, the sort that the Proctors and Keepers here wore, to keep connected to the world every hour of every day. Well, everyone save Petyr). “They don’t seem to follow the laws anymore. Or, the first two. The third sounds like they forgot the last half of it.”

              “True.” Baelish shuffled his only rook to aim at her knight. A standstill. “Why?”

              “Why?”

              He nodded. 

              Sansa blinked, twice. It was just...accepted that the robots — the ones waging the war — were awful creations. Humans tried too hard to make them  _ perfect _ , and the robots turned on their creators because of some flaw in their programming. Not the older models, of course; the ones who were designed for a singular task, like climbing down sewer pipes to fix corrosion, or sweeping the streets of ice and snow. She couldn’t imagine one of them smart enough to go rogue and attack her.

              Not all robots were so benign, though. Even Sansa knew that, far away from it all in Winterfell. 

              “Because…” she began, though she wasn’t sure how to finish.

              “Any guess,” he coaxed. Sansa realized he paused the clock, the hand stuck on thirty-nine.

              “Because someone wanted them to hurt us.” It seemed too basic. “So they erased the first two laws? And without those, they couldn’t violate their third law.”

              “But what if this someone, this shadow person, couldn’t erase them? What if these three laws are so ingrained in their robotic brains — like our residual primal instincts, say when you hear a loud noise and your body tells you to  _ run _ before your brain can think — that no amount of counter-programming could erase them? If they still have these three laws…?”

              Sansa wasn’t sure. She didn’t  _ want _ to admit that she didn’t know, but there was only so much robot philosophy they taught here. Which was to say, little. Anything other than ‘robot bad, humans good, we kill them before they kill us’ was out of the question.

              “A loophole?” It was vague enough to be both right and wrong.

              “A loophole,” Baelish agreed, nodding. He didn’t expand on that, either. As if waiting, or hoping, for Sansa to figure that out on her own. Her brain was too dizzy on all that he said to do more than stare at the board.

              “Speaking of loopholes,” he continued, picking up that blood-red die again. “Desertion. Would you agree that it happens in war?”

              Sansa felt the blood in her veins — as red and glittering as the lights bouncing off that bit of plastic between his fingers — run cold. “Y-yes. I guess so.”

              “And would you say it’s impossible to know  _ which _ of your army would desert, or betray you, when the fighting begins?”

              If this was his way of saying  _ I know what you plan to do _ , then it was close to working. As best she could, she kept her voice level. “Yes.”

              “Then, I propose a new rule. I meant to keep this for tomorrow, but I don’t see the harm in advancing this lesson already.”

              She didn’t say anything in response, so Petyr continued. “This die has a one-in-six chance of popping up on the skull. A bit more extreme than real life, but I digress. Should the skull show up, then one of your pieces has deserted or revealed themself a traitor.”

              Sansa flicked to her row of pieces. She didn’t like where this was going.

              He tossed it onto the table without fanfare, and Sansa felt the ice in her veins grow colder with each bounce. It stopped, finally, glaring up at her.

              Sansa stared at the skull wide-eyed, afraid what it meant for her solid defenses.

              “Ah. How lucky.” He said it with mock-surprise. “I think I’ll pick…” Baelish wiggled his fingers above the board. He didn’t have to make a show of it, Sansa knew what he was going after. “This one.”

              Up and away her queen went.

              “You can’t—!”

              He pulled the piece towards him. “Ah, you don’t get to pick who’s a traitor.”

              Sansa felt her muscles contract at holding back her complaints. He wasn’t wrong. When she would be sent out under the guise of helping their side, they wouldn’t know she instead was going to hightail it as quick as she could. 

              “Then let me roll, too,” she demanded, holding her hand out of for that damned die.

              “Of course. It’s only fair.” He placed it gingerly in her outstretched palm, as though it might explode at any moment. Had Sansa not felt the curious mix of panic and anger boiling in her stomach, she might have noticed how the Proctor’s fingers brushed against her skin. And how in all their lessons before, he’d not touched her once.

              Sansa sent a silent prayer up to her mother’s and father’s gods as she tossed the die. It bounced and clattered, hitting the edge of the board. Spun on a corner: two skull three. 

              Two- 

                      -skull- 

                              -three- 

                                      -two- 

                              -skull—!

              three.

              “Shit.”        

              “A pity,” the Proctor said, pretending to care. He rolled his new queen between his fingers. He settled it beside his white king, before shifting it in a straight path towards her side. 

              “That's not fair,” Sansa muttered. She could only make fists atop her thighs as she watched her perfect kingly defenses crumble. There was a gunner on the other side of her black king, but the hole where her queen had been was glaring. Her knight was the next best defense, but it’s L-shape meant it couldn’t defend all sides of her king. And her other queen was off picking off Petyr’s bishops. Her soldiers, maybe they could…

              Her time was ticking away. Sansa delayed the inevitable, tossing a pawn in the way of her traitorous queen. Her cheeks were as warm as her hands were cold. “It’s not fair.”

              Petyr plucked a black pawn from the board, adding it to his collection. “The point is that war  _ isn’t _ fair, Ms Stark.” The black queen replaced it, set down quietly beside her king. 

              Sansa didn’t want to look up (she knew what he was waiting to say, not having pressed the timer yet). But she had to. She had to face the unfairness of it. Baelish was smiling when she looked up, pleased at the sudden change of rules, she thought. It remained, the smile, even after he said that damned word: “Check.”


	6. no constant conditions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Happy New Year friends!!! :D  
> I’ve had this in a 80-90% state since like Christmas tbh. I meant to get this up so much earlier, but sleep and video games and general foolery… But! Here we go (fucking finally amirite?). Enjoy! ]

              Another shipment of children came in that morning. There were three: one boy and two girls, none of them taller than five foot. 

              Sansa spied them sitting alone at a table in the cafeteria, staring at everything and everyone. Like they couldn’t believe how real their brains imagined this dream. The drabness of the walls with it’s unnamed stains and bugholes. The harsh lights above casting faces into deep shadows. The room slowly filling with other children and teens — all of whom were just the same as they were when they arrived. How curious this world was, they must be thinking behind their fear. How curious, and how quickly they wished to wake up back in their beds, with their families and the delicious smell of breakfast waiting for them. 

              Too soon they'd learn it wasn’t a dream.

              “Hi,” Sansa said, setting her tray on the table as carefully as she could. They startled at her appearance, and one of the girls was poised to jump out of her seat. Metal glittered in her hand (a fork).  _ LIke Arya _ . Sansa’s mind wandered to her sister, and what she was doing and where and whom with. Did she find others on the battlefield, rocking beneath debris and wishing first for home and second for it to end? Did she make it back to Winterfell? Did she turn around, even once, thinking to go back for Sansa?

              There weren’t answers — would never be answers — so she shook her head of the questions. One day, maybe. The day when Sansa would make it back home, then she’d ask Arya.

              It was all she could imagine to keep from going insane.

              Sansa sat on the bench before speaking, hoping that her being closer to their height would make her appear less threatening. That and the smile she kept on. Her voice was soft when she asked, “Where are you guys from?” 

              It was better to ask that than who the children left behind, or how the world looked through the thick canvas curtains of the truck as they rumbled down here. Sansa wanted to know that, too, but now was the time for simpler questions. 

              The other girl (without a fork in her hand) stared at the table as she spoke. Her food was untouched. “Fr-from Ashford.” 

              That was close. The shipment (Sansa hated that word; the problem was it wasn’t untrue) before had been from the Reach, too. Cidertown, which was a stone's’ throw away from Ashford, if she could remember primary school geography. That was mostly farmlands, crucial to the survival of humans since robots had no need to eat. An advantage, Sansa conceded, one she hoped wouldn’t be the downfall of her own kind. 

              People used to burn crops in days when siege was the way to whittle down a town’s defenses. Surely the robots would do it, too, if they managed to corner humans in towns surrounded by massive stone gates from those days past. Sansa tried not to think she was inadvertently besieged here, in the Bunker. She also tried not to think that the cold, drab concrete could be the only thing between her and a glittering ring of metal surrounding them, waiting.

              Then again, robots weren’t infallible. They could die (not  _ die _ like living flesh and blood, but close enough) should their circuitry be smashed to pieces. But robots couldn’t create more of themselves. That knowledge and technology was kept hidden by scientists in King’s Landing and throughout the country.  _ Human  _ scientists. Or, last she heard; the Keepers were meager with information of the outside world.

              Nevertheless, the fact that more children were coming from the Reach had Sansa’s mind spinning with ideas, and none of them good. Farms were vital, and the people who tended them were left with that job rather than rounded up for war. So if these children were  _ here _ and not tending the fields of their parents’, then…

              “Are you siblings?” she asked instead. They were too young to really  _ know _ the world and the war. And too fragile. Perhaps them being together was all that kept them from falling apart.

              The girl who spoke before shook her head. She looked up then, assessing the other two with her. The boy was shaking; the other girl finally sat down (though didn’t relinquish her weapon). “We are— were— neighbors. My mam is— was—" her voice cracked. One shuddering breath, two, before she continued. “They was friends with Nikola's, and Anji's. We been helping out with work as long as we could help with the animals.” She bit her lip: holding back the rest of their story, and her tears. 

              They couldn’t have been anything older than babies when the war began.

              And if they live through the war — and if humans succeed in driving back their creations — then they will only have known war.

              Sansa’s heart hurt for them. 

              Still she forced her smile to remain on her lips. “What sorts of ani—"

              “There you—" Myranda cut her off, freezing beside the table. Assessing the children sitting across from Sansa. She looked at her friend before sitting beside Sansa, one eyebrow up in silent curiosity. "—are.”

              “What sort of animals did you take care of?” Sansa finished. To Myranda, she gave a look of  _ Go along with my questions, and don't say anything brash _ . Sansa could only hope for the best.

              Neither Nikola nor Anji were offering to speak. The other girl swallowed her tears, but not enough to keep a crack out of her voice. “Piggies, and sheeps. And...and Anji had Old Shep. He was the bravest sheep any of us ever did know.” A snuffle drowned out whatever else.

              “Did you really?” Sansa asked the other two. Anji, it seemed, declared Sansa  _ not a threat _ enough to nod. Nikola sat, stunned. He probably wasn’t listening. He was here, but not  _ here _ .

              “Old Shep’s my best friend,” Anji declared. “He… He saved me.”

              The question burned on Sansa’s tongue:  _ saved you from what? _

              The other girl nodded, confirming what  _ things _ the brave sheep took on to get Anji out alive. Sansa doubted it was something as benign as a wolf.

              “We can be friends?” Sansa offered, looking at her own for encouragement. 

              Myranda didn’t say anything, only smiled.

              “Do we…” the boy began, lip trembling. It was impossible to miss the red on his nose and cheeks. She wondered if he cried the whole way from Ashford. Probably. “Do we get to go home soon?”

_ I've wondered that everyday for five years _ , Sansa thought bitterly. “Of course.” She hated lying, especially to a kid so young. “You'll be out of here before you know it.”

              Someone kicked Sansa’s shin. She knew it was Myranda without looking. 

              Nikola's lip continued trembling. “And— and— and—" his voice cracking worse with each attempt. “Mam and pop will be okay, too?”

              “Why wouldn't they be?” It was Myranda who asked the question. Sansa was dying to know, too, but she couldn't dare bring it up because she had a feeling — now confirmed — that something far from good happened for children to be here. 

              The tears flew hard and heavy. Nikola held his face in his hands, falling on top of his tray as his body shook. Anji gave Myranda a nasty look, fork at the ready. 

              The other girl watched Nikola with dead eyes. Maybe she cried all of her tears already and she was jealous of him. Leaning close to Sansa, she whispered, “They're gone. Nik's, and Anji's, and m-mine.”

_ H _ ow? The question burned in Sansa's mind. 

              Anji’s small fingers wrapped around the fork like she couldn't unwrap them, knuckles deathly white. She was grieving as hard as Nikola, only differently.

_ It'll be okay _ . Sansa bit the platitude before it slipped out. It sounded false, because it was. It won’t be okay, and Sansa had five years of experience to prove it. 

              “What happened to your parents?” Myranda asked. She at least didn’t fall into the baseless  _ Everything will be alright _ consoling. But was this — asking these poor children to relive whatever horrors they just had, ripped apart from their family and their lives — any better?

              Sansa scolded Myranda because Sansa knew she was too kind to ask the questions she was dying to know.

              “We were…” Nikola managed through teary gasps. “It was morning. Like every morning. I went out to say good morning to Scrubbins and Anne, but they was— they was cowerin’ in the corner of their pen. I thought maybe one of ‘em was sick, or they was cold. It’s been really cold this winter, and…” On and on his words came out. As if he wanted to say it and see if it would end differently. “And I was thinking mam and pop were up late today, ‘cause they weren’t out checking the fields. I’d see them every morning, moving up and down the rows. Checking for bug and pesties. But they weren’t there, so I thought why not let them sleep. That’d be nice. I’ll check the fields for ‘em. They work as hard as anyone in Ashford and the crops had to be picked soon or else the frost would get ‘em. And I looked back at Scrubbins, and little Anne, and if they could talk they would’a told me  _ Stay, don’t go, don’t even think about it _ . But I ignored ‘em. I went to the— to the fields. And mam and pop had been up already, but they was—"

              Nikola buried his face in his hands. Instead of a barrage of words came sobs, racking though his small frame. 

              A strip of numbers ran down his left arm, shrouded by angry red skin.

              “That’s enough.” Sansa’s heart hurt, watching them. She couldn’t bear seeing them grieving. Pricks of tears started in her eyes, and she blinked them back. “You don’t need to finish.”  _ I can imagine the rest _ .

              Anji screamed. Short, loud, enough to startle everyone in the room to momentary silence. Only NIkola and the other girl weren’t perturbed by the sound.

              Then Anji buried her head in her hands, too, the fork twining through her thick dark hair.

              Sansa knew Anji’s story couldn’t be any better than Nikola’s. And the other girl, too. Waking up to think it was a day like every one before. What they’d give the gods to take themselves back.

              But, in a horrible way, the kids’ grief solidified the truth that the Bunker was safer than outside. Was it worth it to run away, from wherever  _ here _ was all the way up North? Towns and fields would be ravaged, and innocent people lay in were they were slaughtered by mechanical hands.

              Sansa could wind up being another nameless corpse.

              “That’s— I’m so sorry,” Sansa managed. It was little — nothing, really — but she didn’t know what else to say. She at least knew her family was alive when she and Arya were carted away. She could at least live in the dreams that Winterfell would be just the same as it was when she left.

              Even if, deep down, Sansa thought otherwise.

              “Tabytha Townsend.”

              The quieter of the girls looked up. A flash of hope turned her eyes wide, her lips raising in a smile.  _ Home _ , she must be thinking.  _ I get to go home, I get to hug my mother and father again. I get to wake up tomorrow and realize all of this had been a strange dream _ .

              A Proctor approached the table, stopping just shy of the edge. She activated the communicator on her wrist, flipping through the hologram files. Sansa stared at the backwards text, not able to read as fast as the woman flicked them away. The Proctor finally settled on the image of the girl — Tabytha — with brief lines of text beneath. Sansa wasn’t good at reading backwards, catching only the basics: name, weight, height, age (ten! Sansa’s heart shriveled further), hometown. There wasn’t much else, but they didn’t need anything else. Breeding children for war didn’t need the pleasantries of a backstory. 

              There was another line, a six digit code beside the field  _ ID No _ . Seven hells, they already  _ branded _ these kids on their way here. 

              The Proctor didn’t look at Tabytha, reading through her file before flicking to the next. The other girl, Anji, and finally Nikola. Sansa spied the glint of silver through the woman’s short-cropped hair. The communicator. Far more common in the South than the North, but even Sansa’s father had one implanted when the war began. He was too injured from the last war (human on human, though robots helped) to fight again. But Ned’s skills were (Sansa thought) invaluable enough to be bothered every day with a small  _ ping _ . Like a phone, but impossible to ignore.

              Sansa knew they would shove one in her brain once they deemed her ready to leave. It was the least favorite part of her plan. It could  _ track her _ , telling all where she truly meant to go. It meant Sansa had to pry it out of her skull the minute she was freed of the Keeper’s eyes.

              She kept a knife in her boot for that purpose. 

              “Anjelah Flowers. Nikola Wentlyng,” the Proctor said, closing the communicator with a flick of her left wrist. She stood with practiced straightness. “It’s time for your preliminary exams. Please follow me.”

              There were three guards with the Proctor (one for each kid, if they decided to run for it). The children, thankfully, were too shocked and unsure to fight, though Anjelah slipped her fork in her back pocket. Admirable, though forks didn’t do much more than scrape against metal skin.

              Sansa watched them fidget beside the guards, passing each other uncertain looks. The Proctor, meanwhile, looked down at Sansa — her left eye flickering bright blue — before nodding. A burning feeling crawled out from Sansa's chest. She didn't like the idea that she unwittingly helped the Proctors assuage the children into becoming another round of test subjects. Or worse: cannon fodder.

              At least they’re safer in here than outside, Sansa told herself. It helped, a little. Better alive and stuck training for war than lying dead in fields razed by the robots. Or, maybe not. In the fields, they would at least have known their parents were with them (dead, too, but nearby). Who knew what happened to their family, their homes.

              The group of them walked out of the cafeteria without fanfare, the rest of the room having lost interest. Nikola looked back, finding Sansa with large eyes. They were still red from tears. 

              Sansa couldn't help but smile and wave. As if to tell him it wasn't really as bad as it was, being trained for war. They had food (bland and questionable) and a bed (squeaky and flat), but it was better than death.

Maybe they could escape. Arya didn't have a fork when she did.                

              But Arya had a home to go back to.

              “Sentimental?”

              Sansa looked over at Myranda, who was staring at her. Her own fork was stirring the goop on her tray. Specks of it splattered on the table. Sansa breathed before answering. “I just don’t want them to be scared.” Or to be here.

              “Hmm.” Myranda lifted a bit of the goop and flung it back down on the tray.

              It wasn’t like Myranda to be so...uncaring.

              Sansa glanced at the door. The children were long gone. “That was us, remember?” Back to Myranda, who was staring at Sansa with a bit of a tilt to her head. Her thick brown hair was also pulled back into a loose ponytail for afternoon training, which involved more running and jumping than either of them liked.

              Her friend blinked slowly. “Yes, I remember.”

              “And I just…” Sansa continued, watching her fork push the food around on her plate. She was exposed in the cafeteria. No one was  _ watching _ her, not obviously. And there were enough noises to drown out her words if she whispered. But people were always watching her.  _ He _ was always watching her, even if he wasn’t.

              Sansa saw only Petyr’s shadow standing in the back of the room, his eyes never once leaving her.

              Sansa spied the dried blotch of red on the concrete. 

              They never did see Not-Robert after that. 

              “Are you free tonight after dinner?”

              Myranda glanced up at her. “Maybe. Why?”

              The  _ maybe _ was a farce. Of course they were all free after dinner. There wasn’t much to do in the Bunker anyways, unless they wanted to do  _ more _ training: running laps and punching blocks and wiping down blood. Some kids did, and those were the ones heading out on calls. Sansa thought about it, and tried to sneak down to the training rooms, but there were people there who were  _ actually _ good that Sansa was too self-conscious to give it a go. All of the kids that night had already gone outside.

              “I was thinking I’d like to braid up your hair.”

              Another farce. Something  _ innocuous _ enough that no one — kid or adult or robot — would bother to overhear the rest of the conversation. It’d worked so far. 

              The truth being that Sansa would sneak down the halls after lights out to the bathroom, and ‘accidentally’ find herself in Myranda’s room. She used to share it with Guilia and Amala, and the shipments have been fewer and younger that they never bothered to fill up Myranda’s room again. Sansa did her best to convey the brunt of her lessons, but Myranda was even more hopeless at atrocious chess than Sansa was.

              At least it made her feel good, winning, after all the games Baelish played with her.

              “Did you learn anything good today?” Vague enough to be about the proper lessons and not the clandestine ones.

              “It was strategy, again,” Sansa replied.

              Myranda dug her fork into the single sliver of meat, tearing it to pieces. “Again? Seems about all you do now.”

              Sansa shrugged. “It’s...interesting. Beats climbing over rubble, or running laps.”

              “I guess.” Her friend’s fork paused in mid-air. Sansa looked at it, then at the brown eyes studying her beneath errant curls too stubborn for the ponytail. “He’s spending all this time,  _ alone with you _ ...to play chess…” Myranda said it so slowly, as though she was trying to parse another language.

              “Yes,” Sansa stated plainly. Myranda looked like Sansa was holding something back. Which (unless there was something painfully obvious she missed) she wasn’t. “I’m serious.”

              “So am I.” Her friend leaned forward, her boobs shoving her tray forward. “You’re in the prime of your youth, Sans, and after that Joffrey—"

              “Joffrey.”

              “Whatever. After you let your heart get broken by him, you’re gonna waste yourself in here? Not even when you’ve got the  _ perfect _ opportunity…?”

              The way Myranda’s eyebrows wiggled beneath her bangs sent a blush creeping onto Sansa’s face. “Of _course_ _not_. I’m not—" Sansa fumbled over what her friend was saying. Ignored (as best she could) what certain glances could have meant, or minute tugs of smiles, or even when their hands brushed. Nothing. That’s all there was between them. “I’m not _you_.”

              “Oh,” Myranda huffed, settling back in her chair. “Those lessons are wasted on you, you know.”

              Sansa ignored the unintentional implication: that the lessons were a waste of her’s and Petyr’s time. She wasn’t getting out of here, regardless how many games of chess they played, or how many banal conversations they had.

              “It’s not just a game, you know,” Sansa began, fighting the pout in her lips.  _ Not a game despite how I complained the last time _ , Sansa thought. “It’s… It’s more about learning how to think. How to figure out what the enemy is thinking. How to do all of these things with random variables thrown in to screw it all up.”

              “Still sounds like a game.”

              “I mean…” It was Sansa’s turn to huff. Myranda wasn’t wrong, and Sansa also wondered how much of the skills she was learning shifting rooks and bishops around on a board would transfer into the battlefield. Not as though she was going to need it. But on the off chance she couldn’t sneak out the minute she was released, it wouldn’t do her any good to get blown up before she had a chance to make a run for home.

              Sansa poked at her own food. “It’s not  _ just _ chess. He’s had me go through some of the standard drills, too. We just end up playing chess because it’s what I’m best at. And if I want to get called out, I’d need to show the Keepers what I’m good at.” Which, unfortunately, was limited.

              Myranda speared a bit of meat, hard enough to scrape the bottom of her tray. There was a different question on her tongue, Sansa could see. But they were too public to say it. Tonight, maybe, when they braided each other’s hair. “And you are absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent  _ sure _ he doesn’t have any other reason?”

_ I’ve thought of that. _ Well, more  _ ignored _ the thoughts of that. The problem (was it a problem?) was Sansa couldn’t figure out any other reason he would help her. The obvious was trying to figure out what happened to Arya, but she escaped years ago, and Sansa couldn’t think why the Proctors would still bother with her sister. Sansa wasn’t aware of any other breakouts. In fact, they doubled up on the guards when Arya left. As clunky and outdated as they were, the guards had the advantage of being too old-fashioned to turn against them. Something about programming; Sansa wasn’t good at understanding that. 

              Would Anji be able to sneak away with her fork? Sansa hoped she did, and hoped she didn’t. Sansa didn’t want the first corpse she saw outside the bunker to be a ten-year-old girl’s.

              Sansa pulled her gaze away from the growing horrors of the outside, back to her friend. Myranda was deep in thought, too, fighting against whatever memories kept her from the present. Sansa ignored the question poised at her, asking instead, “Do you think you’d be ready soon?”

              Myranda paused. “Me?”

              Sansa nodded. Despite the taste of the goop (which wasn’t much of anything), she shoveled a forkful of the boiled vegetables into her mouth. Overcooked and stringy; just like she never would have had back home. “Yeah. Do you?”

              Myranda breathed in, long and deep, before answering. “Unfortunately, I don’t have  _ private lessons _ to help me along. But...I think so. I can’t imagine being here any longer. I’m old enough to have been those kiddies’ parents, for the Seven’s sake.”

              Nor could Sansa. So many years, it was easy to think  _ just one more week _ . Over and over again, a week turned to a month turned to another year. 

_ Soon _ , she told herself. Soon, Petyr’s lessons would pay off. She would make them, or try her hand sneaking out.

              “Do you think…” Sansa trailed off.

              “Hm?”

              “Nothing.”

              “What?”

              Sansa bit her lip. “It’s just… Do you think Harry is…” They haven’t talked about it, but she wanted to know how her friend was doing. They were all friends, the three of them, but Sansa wasn’t as close to him as Randa had been. “Alive. I mean, still alive—"

              “He’s—!” Myranda didn’t finish —  _ not dead? not alive? stupid for leaving without us? —  _ her fork sailing close enough to Sansa to feel the wind. It hit the wall, clattering on the floor. The din quieted. Other kids in the room looked, curious and afraid. 

              Myranda’s chest rose and fall, fast and then slow. Eventually she sat back down.

              Voices started up around them again. There wasn’t going to be  _ another _ fight today, the rest of the cafeteria realized (happily? Or upset?). One by one they turned back to their own conversations and food. 

              Sansa brushed her cheek, glad it was just wind that sliced her skin and not the fork (what was it with forks as weapons today?)

              Myranda blinked quickly, as if just realizing her outburst. She reached over to steal one of the forks off the trays the new kids left behind. None of them touched their food (or ate it, at least. There was a gouge in the potatoes, like Tabytha was preparing it for seeding out of habit). Myranda pressed the tines of her new fork into the fingers of her other hand. Sansa was surprised she didn’t draw blood.

              It was like looking at herself from months ago.

              Only, Harry hadn’t been a sadistic prick. Sansa realized that the feelings Myranda had must have run deeper than a sudden attraction to a pretty face. Harry wasn’t bad looking, but at a glance between him and Joffrey, Sansa picked Joffrey. Getting to  _ know _ each of them was different, and gods Sansa wished she had picked someone, anyone, else. Even Harry. 

              Sansa bit her lip. There were questions she wanted to ask — out of concern, yes, but also out of obligation to her friend — but she swallowed them down. Later, tonight. When people weren’t going to overhear. Eavesdropping was one of the few pastimes they were allowed in this hellhole.

              Quietly, she said, “You loved him.”

              Myranda barked a short laugh. She wiped the fork down with her napkin, stabbing the meat on her plate with enough force to skid against the metal below. Sansa winced at the sound. “At least it proves it.”

              “Proves what?”

              “That I’m not one of those fucking  _ things _ .”

              Sansa blinked.

              “They can fight us and kill us and we can program them to  _ fuck us _ too,” Myranda said, her teeth grinding against each other. “But they can’t fucking  _ love _ like us. And thank all the gods for that.”

              Myranda choked out a laugh. It was strange — she was more composed than this, especially in public, especially when the hidden eyes of the Keepers and Proctors watched them. But, Sansa supposed, love made people stupid. She’d read about it enough in her books back home.

              She’d  _ experienced _ it — briefly — to have wanted to be everything for Joffrey. Until he shot at her, and laughed when his aim was true.

              After all these years, the Bunker was finally getting to Myranda.

              “When I get outta here,” Myranda began, not looking at Sansa. “I’m gonna strip them all apart, wire by wire. Maybe then those damned things can feel something.”

* * *

              “You wish to be ready for the next deployment?”

              Sansa stood in the center of the Proctor’s office, which wasn’t any more glamorous than the rooms they tested them in. Simple and drab, with exactly what was needed and nothing more. Like a madhouse cell. Sansa wondered how they didn’t go insane.

              She nodded. Confidence was key, she knew, taking a moment to calm herself before speaking (this, of course, didn’t count the several minutes she worked herself up to walk down to this wing of the Bunker. It was just before lights out, and it took everything to keep from thinking  _ tomorrow _ . That was the magical place: tomorrow, she would be called. Tomorrow, she would run back home). “I...think it’s for the best. Not to mention you said in my first lesson that it wouldn’t take much for me to  _ be _ ready.”

              He was wearing his glasses again, and his hair looked like he’d combed his fingers through it a hundred times since the morning. In the life before, Petyr could have been a professor. Messy hair, glasses, a worn turtleneck; he even sported ink stains on the tips of his fingers. Maybe he still would be, once the war was done. 

              A sudden urge to learn more about the Proctor filled her, as though finding out about him and who he was would help Sansa forget for a little while that the world was far from that memory. She smashed it down. What good would come of making friends with the man who was here — by his own admission! — to turn her into a killer first, a target second?

              It didn’t matter, he didn’t matter. 

              But what happened after a war? How easily would life go back to the way it was before things inhuman decided they deserved better? Sansa didn’t know that, either. This was her first war, after all. She didn’t know what would happen after. If — no,  _ when _ — there was an after.

              Baelish watched her think, waiting to reply until Sansa came back to reality with a few blinks. “Using my words against me? How very shrewd of you, Ms Stark.”

              Sansa caught the hint of a smile pulling one edge of Petyr’s mouth. The adults running this facility never  _ joked _ , and they sure as hells didn’t  _ smile _ . “I’m only using what information was given me.”

              The smile pulled, a single sharp tug, before it fell down into a line. Petyr leaned back on his chair with a sharp  _ squeak _ , fingers resting on top of his stomach. “I won’t deny that your records—" he patted to a stack of folders on the side of this desk, each with a curious pen mark and name crossed out, "—are impressive. I’m sure you did well in school, before. But what  _ information _ do you have that tells you — and me — that you  _ are _ ready?”

              Another test.

              Like the test in the cafeteria.

              It  _ had _ to have been, though Sansa never asked him. She had a feeling he would dismiss her with a wave of a hand.  _ I was merely assessing your capabilities under stress _ , he’d say. 

              To be honest, Sansa didn’t ask because she didn’t want to hear him then say,  _ And I’ve concluded that you are a failure _ .

              Before she answered, Sansa had to make sure of something. “This is a private conversation?” Like their private lessons. Private meant illegal? She wasn’t sure. There were cameras in all the rooms and halls (she would have stood outside his office fretting for an hour if it hadn’t been for the glaring lens of someone unseen watching). Sansa didn’t look very thoroughly in Petyr’s office, but the corners, at least, were free of anonymous eyes.

              He looked around, as if shocked to see they were in his office and not one of the private rooms down the hall. “If it isn’t, Ms Stark, then I am obligated to write down what transpires. For the posterity of those who come after you.”

              Meaning, Sansa was free to say what she wanted. She let loose a sigh.

              She could only hope he was as kind as he was during their private lessons. Or, as kind as a man could be, readying a child for war. “There are children who’ve just come into the Bunker.”

              The Proctor nodded. “Yes, straight from Ashford.” He didn’t sound shocked at all, though Sansa was at his blase response. If he knew about them, then he must have known how  _ young _ they were, too. How afraid. How long they wouldn’t last torn apart from their families, even if they were at best lying in their fields. 

              Her chest heaved. Sansa ignored it, fought against the urge to show weakness.

              “If  _ I’m _ not ready—" Sansa hated she was saying it, let alone that she’d been thinking it for weeks. Or, really, years. "—then what makes someone who’s ten or eleven better suited for the outside than I am?”

              Petyr cracked his lips apart, not saying anything.

              She licked her own before continuing. “This war has been waging for...a long time. To the point where we’re using  _ children _ to fight it. Me, and those kids, and all the others. I can’t imagine what we have at ten, eleven, even  _ eight _ that a proper militia experienced for war doesn’t.” 

              Baelish stared at her, face stoic as her voice rose. She didn’t mean for the emotion to show in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. Like how the Proctor couldn’t help the way his eyes stared at her; not stoic and impassive, but...curious? Amused? 

              “And, so…” Sansa took in a deep breath. She glanced about his office, feeling her heart hammering in her chest. Nerves, anger, fear — it was a heady mix leading to an erratic heartbeat. “If  _ I’m _ not deemed ready for the war by now, then there’s no use in me wasting around in the Bunker. Tell the Keepers to send me out already, or…” Sansa forced herself to look at him. “Or kill me.”

              Petyr stared at her. The only noise was her heart: heavy and fast, a miracle her ribs contained it.

              “Perhaps the Keepers are waiting.”

              Sansa blinked. “For what?” That was hardly the answer she was expecting to hear.

              Petyr, however, paused before answering. “For...whatever they want. It’s them leading the war, after all. I’m only here to assess you and notify them when we’ve made a soldier of you. And let the med team know to prepare your comms device and the like.” He tapped at the side of his head, revealing his personal lack of communicator. Blue didn’t spark in his eyes; they were solid, grey-green. Then he flicked his hand through the air, catching dust motes. “My job does not extend outside of the Bunker.”

              Assessing them by a set of conditions that Sansa had no way of knowing (not when Harry was ready the same time as Greysen).  _ Then why haven’t I been sent out yet?  _ She could do little more than ball her fists.

_ Harry… _ She cut the thought short. Like Myranda, she didn’t want to think what happened to him. Better that than mulling over all the intricate ways he would have died. 

_ If Harry had been ready, why not me _ . Sansa chewed the inside of her cheek.  _ If new kids arrived, how much longer did they expect this war to last? Years? Decades? Forever? _

              Those children (and they were! They were only ten and nine) were here to replace Sansa and Myranda and the rest of the older kids once they were  _ deemed ready _ for the outside.

              So why hasn’t she yet?

              “And  _ children _ are the answer to fighting robots?” Sansa felt ghostly arms wrap around her. Her mother, all those years ago, not willing to let go. Cat’s face was cloudy, like Sansa staring at her reflection in a fogged mirror. Unclear from years of not seeing her, but Sansa knew she felt tears on her mother’s cheeks. Sansa knew she heard a tremble as she said goodbye. “Is there a caveat to their rules? That they can’t harm kids?”

              Sansa expected Petyr to laugh at her ridiculous theory. He didn’t. “It is...a theory that we have been testing.”

              What.

              Her heart froze. A cryptic answer, a wave of his hand; that’s what Sansa expected Petyr to do. Not actually answer her.

              “A theory…”

              “I’m not privy to all of it,” he added, as though realizing he just said something aloud he shouldn’t have. “The war — as you’ve said — has been a heavy burden to the country and its people. How much longer will we last against our creations? How much longer until we have new masters? How soon will we be marked down  _ extinct _ in history books we’ll never read?”

              A shiver ran up her spine.

              Petyr shrugged his shoulders, as though they weren’t discussing the fate of the humanity. “Like you, Ms Stark, I haven’t seen much of the outside world. It’s bleak, so I’ve heard. Full of monsters, and corpses. Not a thing for  _ children _ .”

              He was staring into the distance as though watching a memory. What did he see, she wondered. 

              “And what of the people who  _ should _ be fighting this war?” Sansa interrupted. The meager lessons they had outside of weapons and athletics and tactics said little if anything about why they were here. They, as in  _ children _ , as in the sorts of people who should be protected from the onslaught of fighting. Sansa remembered other children (braver than her) asking the questions:  _ Are we supposed to be here? Do we have to learn this? When will we go home?  _ She wanted to laugh at the lies they told them:  _ Soon, as soon as the war is over _ . Five years and it was still  _ soon _ . “They can’t all possibly be…”  _ dead _ , though she didn’t say it.

              “They’re fighting it, the same as you and I.”

              Sansa didn’t see what she was doing as fighting, as contributing to the war. 

              His question punctuated the silence first. “So you want to save the children, is that it?”

              Sansa felt her brows furrow before she could stop them.

              Petyr shot forward with a harsh  _ squeak _ of his chair, resting elbows on the table and his head in the cradle of his fingers. “Or, do you have some other reason for wanting to promote yourself out of here? I suppose the food isn’t the best, I’ll give you that...”

              She  _ did _ have a reason, of course. And gods-damn the Proctors and the Keepers and whoever first started the war. Whoever first decided to create things meant to  _ kill _ . Sansa chewed on her lower lip, not trusting her words should she open her mouth. Not now when he was staring at her like a cat to a mouse.

              It would be a lie to say she  _ wasn’t _ afraid. Of being sent outside where horrors lurked in shadows; even in the bright of day. Of being stuck in here for so long she  _ would _ wither and rot until they all but forgot about her; or threw her away.

              Fear, however, wasn’t what the Proctors wanted. A good little soldier, willing to take up her weapon and fire on command.

              He dragged his tongue across his lips, a movement that pulled her from the grip of her thoughts. Sansa didn’t realize she was watching until it slipped back between his lips. “I am,” he said quietly, “of course, only using the information that was given me.”

              Her own words shot back at her. 

_ He’s playing with me _ . 

_ No. He’s only making sure that I’m ready. He said as much.  _

              The Proctors’ job wasn’t to mess around with the kids. Only to monitor their progress through the various exams, and notify the Keepers they were ready for slaughter. The robots’, but mostly their own.

              Sansa shook the thought away. Her answer was obvious: “I want the war to stop.” 

              Petyr’s mouth (and only his mouth) smiled at her response. He knew, then, that it wasn’t the truth, but it was what was expected of her. “I see.”

              Petyr stood sharply, the chair squealing backwards. He took the two steps to the nearest bookshelf bolted to the wall. It was as harsh-looking as the rest of the furniture in the room, though the softness of the spines (some of which were so worn the titles were gone) shot Sansa back to the library in Winterfell. Stacks so high she could crane her neck all the way back and never spy the top shelf. They played hide and seek in there often, during winter storms, and only once accidentally knocked a shelf down. It bled book upon book, a crash so loud each of the Stark kids bolted out of the library as quick as they could.

              The Proctor ignored the books, opening instead a drawer on the bottom half of the bookshelf. Sansa spied files, probably fifty of them crammed in that one drawer. She counted the other drawers on the bookshelves lining the perimeter, and balked at the estimate: three hundred.

              Three hundred children, for just one of the Proctors. If there were ten of them, then  _ three thousand innocent children _ walked through these stark grey walls of the Bunker. Some of them were still here, as she was. But most of them were gone.

              Most of them were dead.

              And Sansa knew (not thought, but  _ knew _ ) that few if any survived the battlefields. These were  _ children _ going up against machines designed to destroy. 

_ A theory _ , he said. A theory of what? That machines would take pity on them because they were young and afraid? And when that didn’t work, the Keepers demanded children to be trained in firearms and tactics. And when that didn’t work…

              She knew that was as much as she was going to get. Petyr had said too much already. They weren’t  _ friends _ , no matter how comfortable she felt in his presence.

              If Sansa didn’t know better, she’d have thought the war was meant to rid Westeros of humans. And after that? Should the robots win, what was stopping them from running rampant across the rest of the world, until living, breathing things no longer did? 

              Sansa looked away from the doom of the folders, scanning the rest of the room whilst the Proctor’s back was turned. There wasn’t much she missed on her first assessment. Odd medical bits and bobs sat at random intervals between the books, as though separating one section from another. A small silver device, similar to a communicator. A small bird figure. And more piles of books on their sides, spines without names. There wasn’t a photo in sight of his life before the war.

              Behind where Petyr had sat was a low table, relatively free of cram compared to the rest of the bookshelves. Little adorned the surface, but there was a jar filled with two things: clear liquid, with bubbles coagulating along the edges; and a skull. Human, a thick crack running down the length of it. Fine bubbles trailed the crack. Worse than that, was the fact  _ muscle _ remained on the pale white bone. As though whatever liquid it sat in was eating it alive. Sansa wondered (feared) that there were things in that liquid, consuming it. Her skin crawled at the idea of being submerged, feeling things eating at her flesh. 

              She only hoped whoever it was had been dead long before.

              The drawer shut with a heavy  _ thud _ . Sansa shot her gaze back on Petyr, who thumbed through her file until he found what he was looking for. He stood there, leaning against the middle bookshelf, eyes moving over whatever information he needed. Sansa was surprised he needed to look at it; her file accompanied them during their private lessons, though she rarely saw him write anything down.

              “What role would you like?”

              Sansa blinked. “Role?”

              Petyr nodded. “If I’m to plead your case to the Keepers when they return from the other compounds, then we’d best have your story ironed out.”

              So he  _ was _ considering it. Not only that, but he would have issued her ready regardless. Sansa felt the welcome threads of doubt slink away, slowly, one at a time.

              She knew there was one role she should say, and she did. They spent more time practicing strategy through those blasted chess games. Though losing more than winning, Sansa felt she  _ was _ learning. Petyr forced her to think, overthink, to assess each piece for their weaknesses and strengths. Stubborn as she was to begin with — and still not having won enough times to use her second hand to count them all — she was getting better. Petyr was getting better, too, which only made it more difficult to win.

              And it seemed ridiculous, after all that chess, to offer herself up as anything else.

              “Given the information present,” she began, earning another small pull at the Proctor’s mouth, though his gaze was still on her file. “I believe the best role for my strengths would be a, um, tactician.” Or, whatever the  _ proper _ term was. 

              “Why?”

              She opened her mouth to say as much as she had thought. 

              “Just because you’re issuing the orders doesn’t make you safe. What makes you say you won’t cower at the first conflict?” Petyr thumbed the sheafs in his hands, looking for something (or pretending to). “What’s to say you wouldn’t run away at the first death?”

              Shadow hands wrapped her heart again.  _ I will _ . “I won’t.”

              “You won’t?”

              Sansa shook her head. The Proctor couldn't hear it, but he continued as though he had. “You won’t shy away when the battles turn against you? When your army falls, one by one, or even all together in an unforeseen explosion or missile — you won’t break down with the knowing of your loss? Nor will you cry out when you’re cornered, when they torture you for any shred of information because you’re the one in charge. Or, when you’ve forgotten how it feels to live without the weight of the blood of those who died at your commands.” The edges of the folder shut with a quick  _ fwip _ of paper. “You’re saying you won’t run away?”

              The air grew heavy with silence. In it, cloying as it was, Sansa wondered if the hammering of her heart traveled along the air, beating against everything in the room. “Is that what separates us?”

              Petyr looked at her finally. “ _ Us _ ? You mean from the robots?” Sansa nodded. “Fear isn’t unique to humans. Neither are emotions.”

              “So, those  _ things _ are afraid, too?” It sounded as ridiculous out loud as it did in her mind. The idea that robots — unfeeling, mechanical, following the commands hardwired in their processors — could feel anything. That they could cry like Nikola, or rage like Garrold. That what Baelish said about her cowering and collapsing would apply to something robotic, too.

              Myranda’s outburst earlier echoed in her mind. Seething  _ rage _ , and hurt, and jealousy, and love.

              No. Robots couldn’t feel. They couldn’t.

              “Is there anything else you want to ask, Mr Baelish?”

              He watched her (always watched her). What did he see, she wondered, but not for long. Petyr shook his head. “You wish to proceed with your offer?”

              Sansa nodded. Anything to get out of here.

              “And you know what happens should you succeed?”

              Sansa nodded again. “I get to leave. And fight,” she added quickly. “Or, whatever they need me to do. To stop the war.”

              It sounded as false out loud as it did in her head. Petyr made no mention of it. “And before that, you’ll undergo a final medical exam where they’ll issue you your implants. Have you had one before?” Sansa shook her head. “Good, good.”

              “Should I…” she began, shaking her head. It wasn’t good to start showing doubt, fear, not when Petyr wanted the opposite. A warrior, a soldier; not a feeling thing.

              “It won’t be easy,” he said by way of ignoring her unasked question. Petyr wandered back to his desk, setting her file down on top of the others, and leaned against the edge facing Sansa. “Though, I’m sure you are aware of that.”

              Sansa nodded. She did her best to ignore the silent assessment he was giving her (as if weighing whether she  _ could _ pass whatever test he was devising for her).

              “It won’t be as easy as — what did you say it was? — really bad chess games.”

_ Easy? _ Sansa didn’t think those were easy, especially when he came up with new rules each game. If she thought she was close to winning after he added the timer, that damned desertion dice blew her chances out the window. Sansa was waiting for when the pieces would explode randomly.

              And suddenly hated the thought, picturing those three  _ children _ as the pieces she commanded. Tentatively they opened up their hearts to their pain. She saw Nikola’s teary eyes and Anji’s white knuckles and Tabytha’s quivering lip. Petyr’s joking words of  _ having the pieces blow up _ . Sansa shook her head, not before she watched the three shrieking bodies torn to shreds. 

              Sansa shuddered.

              “This time next week,” Petyr said finally. He stood up from the desk, his full height just shy of her own. Though he had to stare up at her, Petyr still commanded her attention. “I’m sure I can sway them to consider your capabilities. It’s not often someone convinces a Proctor to do this.”

              “Are you saying that I’m ready?” She didn’t want to read too much into his words, but she had to know. If, after all this time and all these extra lessons, but she was fated to live out the rest of her life in this bleak concrete box...

              “I’m not saying anything,” Petyr answered. 

              Sansa huffed a sigh. 

              He looked almost amused at her exasperation. “Do we have a deal?”               

              Petyr held out his hand to hers. Sansa stared at it. It was unconventional, asking a Proctor for something like this. And their training was unconventional. And her vying for her release to war (though not really) was unconventional.

              Sansa couldn’t do much else but take his hand and shake it. It was soft but cold, colder than a spark of fear that shot up her arm at the contact.  _ Like signing a contract with a demon, selling him my soul _ . The demons their Old Nan warned them about — bred from the shadows of night, skin as black as a starless sky and eyes burning blue — looked nothing like the man standing opposite her. “Deal.”

              To be fair to six-year-old Sansa, though, the world was a lot different than the stories Old Nan told her. If only because a robot uprising wasn’t prominent in them.

Sansa pulled her hand away first. She licked her lips, surprised how dry they were. “Can I ask what I can expect?”

              His gaze fell to her neck in thought. “No. Though, I’m sure that was the answer you were expecting, Ms Stark.”

              It was. Worry gnawed inside her. A test that she had no way to prepare for. The idea that she would fail threatened to squeeze all her breath from her lungs.

              “I do hope you aren’t…” Petyr began, cutting himself off. Weighed the rest of whatever hope he had. Shaking his head, Petyr stared at her over the rim of his glasses; the light blinded her to one eye. “One week, Ms Stark. I hope you are as prepared as you think you are.” 

              It sounded almost like a  _ threat _ . 

              “And what if I’m not?” She didn’t like thinking of being unprepared — of  _ failing _ — but it was possible. 

              Petyr only smiled. “For your sake, you better not be.”

              The uncertainty in her stomach fell to the floor. 

              She had no idea what to expect, and no idea how prepared she could be, after five years stuck here training day after day. But she couldn’t voice her doubts. Sansa knew what she  _ had _ to say, despite how unsteady her limbs suddenly felt. With a nod of her head: “I’ll be ready.”


End file.
